Many theatregoers can chart their life of play-watching through productions of Edward Albee’s modern, 1962 classic.
My first encounter with his warring couple was with the 1966 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. I watching it as a shocked child on TV. The first stage version I saw was relatively late in the play’s life 30 years later with Diana Rigg and David Suchet which was followed a decade after that by Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin.
Every time I have seen the play it has been best thing I have seen for ages. This time is no different.
True, like most great works Albee’s best play is a gift to directors and actors. So you have to go some way to screw up this gripping real-time battle between two people who were so right for each when they married 23 years before the play is set. But with Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup as Martha and George this production directed by Marianne Elliott is up there with the best.
Designer Miriam Buether sets this alcohol-fuelled long night’s journey into day on a round stage with no place in this 1960s New England living room for the combatants to hide. As Martha, Anderson’s performance requires close attention in order to detect the love that still exists for the man she attempts to kill with a thousand humiliating cuts.
Outwardly her beef is disappointment and dissatisfaction with George who has failed to succeed. He should be running the history department of the college founded by Martha’s father. Instead he is still a tutor there just as he was when they were married. Inwardly there is more going on which is only revealed much later in the mostly real-time drama.
Until then the hosts fire withering insults at each other. Each is offered to the young, naive guests (an excellent Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn) like sour snacks to go with the booze.
As George, The Morning Show star Crudup delivers one of the performances of the year. Having earlier played the reluctant killer hero in the West End adaptation of High Noon, here the American actor’s cardigan-wearing, under-achieving academic is a very different animal.
Although Crudup’s George is a formidable foe, when Martha’s jibes land their weight can be seen in a slight pause as he pours everyone’s drinks and with an almost imperceptible shake of his head as another of his wife’s verbal right hooks land. As brutal as it is funny, you leave both bruised and thrilled.
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