Fear stalks the characters in Edward Albee’s most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; it’s so pervasive, it’s in the title. But what is the source of that fear? Surely not the modernist author, who’d committed suicide two full decades before the play was written? These are highly educated, comfortably middle-class people, so what precisely scares them so much?
For the couple at the centre of the work, fear is something to be endured – just like other by-products of living, such as disappointment, boredom and cynicism. George (David Whiteley) and Martha (Kat Stewart) have lived for decades in the grounds of the university where he works, under the all-seeing eye of her father, the university’s president. Albee establishes in the opening minutes a sense of these two as masters of endurance, even if it’s a poisoned and monstrous mastery, always on the lookout for weakness and fatigue.
The plot is so simple it exists near the level of myth. George and Martha invite a younger couple – new biology professor Nick (Harvey Zielinski) and his compliant wife Honey (Emily Goddard) – over for late-night drinks, then proceed to tear strips off them and each other in a grim and relentless excoriation. But Albee’s play is far from simple. Detailed and highly resonant, these late-night cruelties take on a ritualistic quality.
While the central battle seems to be generational – between the acrid disillusionment of middle age and the strapping self-belief of youth – it soon becomes clear the characters are actually caught in private prisons, haunted by their past potential and the yawning chasm of the future. The play was written in the warm afterglow of John F Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, but seems to anticipate the assassination that would follow, the great rupture in American confidence and conviction.
Director Sarah Goodes – who triumphed at Melbourne Theatre Company earlier in the year with Sunday and has worked extensively across the country – conducts the bloodsports with precision and rigour, on a tiny set designed by Harriet Oxley to look as drab and middling as possible. The playing space is a little too small, with the actors forced to bunch up in the middle of the room when they should be ranging about, but the upshot is an intimacy and intensity that puts the audience right in the eye of the storm – a proximity that feels dangerous and thrilling.
It is a play of massive personalities, and the wattage emanating from the cast is often electrifying. With Stewart and Whiteley returning to this theatre after making their names in film and TV (the season is already completely sold out), the opportunity for scene-chewing dramatics might have been tempting. Sparks do fly and invective spews forth, but Goodes is also keenly attuned to the play’s subtler moods, its elegiac quality.
As the primary pair, Whiteley and Stewart berate, harangue and rail at each other, but they also show an aching tenderness and compassion. For all their bitterness and despondency, George and Martha are vehemently alive and recognise this life-force in each other, if perhaps not in themselves. There is real love mixed in with the hatred and vitriol. She calls it a “vile, crushing marriage”, but it sometimes feels like a bulwark against the indignities of living.
Stewart centres Martha’s sexuality – its kittenish quality, but also its raw, insatiable hunger – in a performance of great power and range. She stalks the stage, she flies into rages, she sulks and pouts, but there is a kind of steely assurance about her too. She is formidable, in a way that tends to dwarf those around her. Whitely is far more reserved, his natural charm almost inverted. Softly spoken and thoughtful, he manages to convey the curious mix of wretchedness and intellectual dynamism in George. He has a hesitant start, and dropped a number of lines on opening night, but he grows in stature and nobility as the show wears on.
The secondary couple are necessarily subjugated, foils for the pyrotechnics of the hosts; but they are both terrific roles, complex and sad. Zielinski nails the slick, colourless swagger of Nick, but he’s also able to convey a sense of wistfulness and self-awareness that isn’t necessarily on the page. Goddard is hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure; her Honey is silly, outrageous and chaotic, but also watchful and wary. You sense her dawning realisation about her chosen mate, his callousness and cunning.
The production doesn’t attempt to open out or deconstruct the play, but it would be a mistake to see it as textbook. The vice-like grip of patriarchy – evident in the casual misogyny of the men, the looming figure of Martha’s father, the immovable expectations of gender – is more palpable than I remember. The women are kinder to each other, their rapport born of their desperation perhaps; you can imagine them grasping for one another in the dark. But even George and Nick are depicted in a more compassionate light. They grapple with societal rules too, with a world that demands they lock horns and fight to the death.
Some of the play’s concerns – apprehension around genetics; the fear of barrenness – feel quaint these days, so that the central tragedy feels slightly overwrought. And yet, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? continues to fascinate and appal. There is something abstruse and perplexing at its heart, and each production of it feels like an attempt to plumb its depths. Perhaps Virginia Woolf represents for George and Martha a kind of cultured life that is rapidly receding into the past. Perhaps her inability to cope with the slights and losses of living, haunts them. Perhaps they’re scared of themselves and each other, of the people they were and the ones they’ve become. It’s a pervasive fear, one hard to resist as the dawn approaches.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf runs at Red Stitch theatre until 17 December
