Just the one. Photo: Robert Day
While we may all strive for a happiness in our real-life relationships, it doesn’t seem to make for great art. There’s something voyeuristic and almost masochistic about watching the depiction of a relationship fall apart. Edward Albee’s masterpiece may be the finest example of the ‘anti-love story’. Genuinely shocking when it first premiered in New York in 1962, it’s lost none of its power nearly fifty years on. It’s a fine choice for the first collaboration between Sheffield Theatres and Newcastle’s Northern Stage company.
Sian Thomas and Jasper Britton play George and Martha, a middle-aged, middle-class couple in New England, constantly sparring with each other both verbally and physically. It’s a toxic relationship, but one on which they both thrive. Albee’s play is set over one long night where they invite a younger couple, Nick and Honey, round for the world’s most awkward nightcap. In the right hands, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? can pack a real punch to the guts. Thankfully, this production is in more than the right hands: the casting is perfect and Erica Whyman directs with flair and confidence.
The play is a long one, running to over three hours in this production, but necessarily so. Set in real time, the audience feels as if they’ve been on the same journey as the two couples: it’s certainly emotionally draining and can be gruelling at times, but is all the more rewarding for it.
Albee’s play is a masterful exercise in social unease. The first act sets up the scenario nicely, with George and Martha bickering constantly, and although there’s plenty of caustic laughs to be had, there’s also a sense of foreboding. The play becomes darker in the second act, where the extent of dysfunction begins to be revealed, setting things up nicely for a third act which is so electrifying it takes your breath away.
All four actors rise to the challenge. Sian Thomas in particular captures the dual sides of Martha, a woman unafraid to use her sexuality to taunt her husband yet who also becoming more and more poignant and pathetic as the play goes on. Jasper Britton makes the perfect sparring partner; initially, he’s unbearably passive, a shell of a man, but Britton expertly reveals George’s dark side. his emerging and increasingly dominant cruelty.
John Hopkins and Lorna Beckett, as Nick and Honey, have roles that are inevitably less showy. Beckett displays superb comic timing in the first act as the mousy drunk, Honey, while Hopkins is convincingly all-American as Nick, the seemingly decent guy who’s still willing to “hump the hostess” while his wife lies insensible with drink in an upstairs bathroom.
Whyman’s handling of the escalating intensity is deft, especially in the extraordinary third act with its climatic revelation. Britton chants a Latin prayer while Thomas appears perilously close to a breakdown and you realise you’re watching something very special.
Soutra Gilmour’s set design makes superb use of the wide space of the Crucible stage; George and Martha’s house has all the touches of early 60s middle-class respectability: door chimes, an elegant, dark wooden staircase and enormous shelves filled of books. The costume design (influenced, as the programme notes tell us, by the style of Mad Men and Revolutionary Road) enhances this visual richness. It all adds up to a theatrical experience that is compelling, exhausting and ultimately, unmissable.
