The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?

Everything seems great in the Gray family. Martin has reached 50 and is about to receive a prestigious award for architecture, wife Stevie is feeling great after 22 years of happy marriage and 19-year-old son Billy is finding his way as a perky gay guy. They live in a big American house with modern paintings on the living room walls and lots of costly (and highly breakable) pots and plates. So why is Martin so damned restless and moody?

The first scene between Martin (Nathan Page) and his old friend, television producer Ross (Mark Saturno), goes badly wrong. Martin’s mind is clearly elsewhere and Ross, kindly, pulls out of a planned interview. And the subsequent conversation with otherwise content wife Stevie (Claudia Karvan) also goes badly, as does a brief encounter with young Billy (Yazeed Daher). 

Martin is completely obsessed, we learn, with a new ladylove named Sylvia... who turns out to be, yes, a goat. Stevie, utterly lost, demands to know: is Martin’s betrayal sexual or emotional, moral or natural? 

The play, written by Edward Albee in 2000 and winner of the Tony Award for Best Play, sets out to give an answer. Written nearly 40 years after his sublime Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf he still enjoyed a position of prominence. ‘The play is about love,’ he wrote of The Goat, ‘and loss, and the limits of our tolerance and who, indeed, we really are.’ No small matter.

The cast have a ball. Claudia Karvan is terrific as the furiously wronged wife, getting to grips with the unhinged truth. Her first scene seems to require its own sitcom laugh track, growing later into howls of vengeful pain. 

Yazeed Daher is equally telling as the gay son, and Mark Saturno makes his mark as the grudging supplier of truth. Nathan Page has the impossible task of making the truth of his relationship with the goat (however beautiful) appear rational. I saw him try, but did not believe it.

Overall direction is by Mitchell Butel and the setting by Jeremy Allen is at first a splendidly tidy living room, soon to be covered in wreckage and broken plates as Stevie really gets going.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Prudence Upton