There have been some truly excruciating house parties over the years - Abigail's and Noel Edmunds' spring to mind - but after 43 years, Edward Albee's play remains undimmed as the beacon of social awfulness. There is a lot of blind mistrust and ideological hatred in the world, and for three gruelling hours, most of it seems to be contained within George and Martha's shabby genteel drawing room in New England.
Gemma Bodinetz's production is spot on with the details: threadbare antiques, thirsty house plants and the kind of mottled paper lampshades that absorb more light than they transmit. Such close attention pays dividends in making this frowsy room a metaphor for a world on the brink - of the cold war when the play was written, or holy war today.
Albee's work is never an easy ride: it is remorselessly long with two intervals, though so much alcohol is consumed over the course of the evening that the actors clearly deserve a toilet break.
However, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains a great play because it inspires great performances. Nick Court and Kaye Wragg are excellent as the guileless, smiling guests, who roll up like two fluffy balls of wool coming within range of a particularly spiteful kitten.
Denise Black's marvellously blowsy Martha is as vituperative, vindictive and manipulative as they come. Yet she grasps the essential fact that monsters only capture the imagination if they are formed around the core of their original humanity. Martha needs a strong man to stand up for her, but unfortunately she has George, a stewing second-rate historian who nonetheless proves, in Ian Bartholomew's exquisitely simmering performance, to be a master of malignant mind games.
There has to be some kind of redemption for this long night's journey into day, and it comes in the final moments as Bartholomew and Black subside into a spent, sobbing embrace. It's an exceptional moment that proves that to be capable of such unbridled hatred, one must have an equal capacity for magnanimous love.
· Until April 23. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
