Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

This National Theatre Live revival (if that’s the word) of Edward Albee’s famous 1962 play features a stellar cast: Imelda Staunton as Martha, Conleth Hill as George, Imogen Poots as Honey and Luke Treadaway as Nick.  Any production of this play, however, can’t help but aspire to escape the memory of the 1966 movie adaptation (by Ernest Lehman) for which director Mike Nichols had the inspired idea of casting Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  Comparisons may be odious, but in this case, they are rather inevitable.

Unlike recent stylised and large scale productions filmed by National Theatre Live, this Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London, is intimate, ‘naturalistic’ and almost obeys Aristotle’s dictum that the action occurs in ‘real time’ – here from 2 am on a Saturday night through to dawn Sunday.  The setting is a cluttered, shabby, middle-class 1960s living room of an academic’s house on or near a university campus.  Tom Pye’s design is detailed to the last dog-eared book, kitsch knickknack and loaded drinks trolley.  The meticulous detail is even more evident to the cameras’ eyes.  The drinks trolley features heavily as prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed, exacerbating vituperative if highly articulate and literate aggression.  During the course of this long (and it is long) evening, Martha, the daughter of the university’s president, viciously attacks and humiliates George, her husband who is a failed history professor – and George counter-attacks in defence.  Only at the end of the play is the genesis of this warfare revealed – warfare exacerbated because George and Martha have an audience: Nick, a new, young and cocksure recruit to the Biology Department, and Honey, his naïve and not-so-bright wife.  When George smells blood, he can turn on them too…

In this production, Luke Treadaway as Nick is rather stiff and dull, but maybe that’s the character he plays.  When he attempts a riposte to George’s pyrotechnics, he’s a self-righteous plodder even when he’s right.  In fact, Nick is a rather repulsive young man – a fact that George susses out very quickly – and he becomes more unpleasant the more he reveals.  As his poor wifey Honey, Imogen Poots, in what I believe is her first stage role, shines.  You have to be smart to play someone not so smart.  Innocent Honey becomes touching as this awful evening rolls on.  She moves from the butt of jokes she doesn’t get to someone for whom we feel as it’s revealed her ‘protective’ husband despises her and George humiliates her.

Prior to this production, I would have said Imelda Staunton could do anything, but here – at the risk of being howled down and finding myself in a tiny minority – she is miscast.  I’d almost say she knows it: she’s working too hard and it shows.  She becomes shrill and one note.  No doubt Ms Staunton is a much better actress than Elizabeth Taylor (here’s one of those comparisons), but Ms Taylor – serendipitously or not – brought more nuance and – it must be said – faded, wasted beauty to the role.  Ms Staunton’s Martha becomes a monster.  By the time she gets to her explanatory soliloquy in Act Three, it’s too late: we’ve checked out.  Taking further risk of being incorrect by mentioning physical appearance, when Ms Staunton changes into the tight-fitting ‘sexy’ outfit, it is just wrong – misjudgement rather than pathos - and her flirting with Mr Treadaway and his response (no matter how drunk he is supposed to be) looks pretty much like very hard work for both of them.

What holds the production together and makes it absolutely worth seeing, is the performance of Conleth Hill as George.  (If the name is unfamiliar to you, think, if possible, of the cunning eunuch in Game of Thrones.)  Mr Hill, a little paunchy, a big man but with the lightness of a dancer, registers and conveys brilliantly his history professor who is a failure and who knows he is a failure, who is weak and knows he’s weak, who is incisively witty and entertainingly tendentious, who has a quick insight into people that enables him to be cruel – and yet show us he regrets his cruelty even as he twists the knife.

My other comparison with the movie adaptation is that the movie script is tighter, more focussed, more economic and less repetitious.  Okay, it’s a movie script so it has to be more sparse, but the original text, as seen here, does go on – and on - and by the end we are as exhausted as the characters.  An apocryphal story is that Mr Albee hated Mr Lehman’s adaptation.  Mr Lehman protested that he had hardly changed a thing.  To which Mr Albee replied, ‘Exactly!’  But Mr Lehman did change things and to my mind for the better.  Brilliant per se as Albee’s dialogue is, there is, for me, Philistine that I am, just too much of it.

If Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf has a theme – and the late Mr Albee always refused to enlighten us on that score – it’s about lies – lies and failure.  Nick, for all his bluff conceit, is morally compromised. He allows Honey to believe the lie that he loves her and not her money.  Martha reveres her father, but knows he does not love her.  And Martha and George have concocted a shared and deeply private lie to assuage a shared pain.  George is the character who knows but does not lie.  This virtue keeps him in agony.  It is his goodness and love that makes him co-creator with Martha of the lie.  When Martha unthinkingly, boastfully – she’s a boastful liar – shares that lie with the outsiders, all hell breaks loose.  Whether this central metaphor is distinctly American or universal is a moot point.  I’d say universal.

Michael Brindley

Photos by Johan Persson