Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

Like all theatrical masterpieces Edward Albee’s just keeps on giving. Benedict Andrews’ staging for Belvoir Street (2007) was all glass and sleek corporate menace, with the fighting couple actually turning to violence.

We also peered through glass - and over water - at another modern, if less thrilling South Australian version. Staged for the 2022 Sydney Festival, a multicultural cast added race to this explosive drunken night.

Now in a Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre production from Melbourne, designer Harriet Oxley returns the play to1962, to a cold, anonymous living room in shades of green, dominated by a central bar.

It’s the New England home of George (David Whiteley), a history academic with a spluttering career, and his braying wife Martha (Kat Stewart), the privileged daughter of the university’s president. Their late night guests, a quietly ambitious, younger academic Nick (Harvey Zielinski) and his unworldly wife Honey (Emily Goddard), are soon embroiled in their host’s increasingly vicious storytelling games.

These games have a history, a once benign one, when George and his smart young wife used stories - and booze - to placate her frustrations and lovelorn upbringing. Director Sarah Goodes shows clearly how these games have turned foul, the tragedies they cover are now weaponised, and the couple’s dependence on each other is so cruelly destructive.

Kat Stewart is brilliantly biting and flirtatious as Martha, her aching heart barely hidden in her theatrical attacks, nor her motivation for taking young Nick to bed. David Whiteley’s George is also outstanding if less transparent than she when scheming his revenges. But his love too for Martha is still there, rising above the bile. (The two actors are married).

Emily Goddard brings a wicked physicality to the shy Honey, dancing and flirting while dead drunk, her childless marriage already doomed. Harvey Zielinski is not quite the handsome jock of Nick but the cynicism he finally reveals is shockingly incidental and crude.

It’s a long production, more than three hours with two intervals but, except for a sometimes lagging last act, Goodes’ pacing and depth of storytelling matches Albee’s masterpiece. Short musical notes provide striking dramatic punctuation (Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter) as does the lighting by Matt Scott.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton