WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THE ADC
Holly Masters as Honey and David John as George
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a coruscating piece of drama. Director Lesley Ford’s brilliant actors kept the tension taut and the atmosphere electric. This ADC tour de force is a rare chance to encounter the genius of Edward Albee in all his quirky sharp uncensored glory. His famous couple Martha and George (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of legend) do not so much bicker and quarrel as spar like two fencing partners - yet beneath the bouts of hostility is, in the end through all the outrageous capers, a savage kind of love.
David John as George (six years younger than Martha, as he constantly tells her) is the languid American professor with the sharpest lines of the entire play. He has had twenty three years to think about his situation. As Martha confesses, they fell in love when he was a junior assistant and she was hopeful he would rise like the cream. But he didn’t. Martha taunts him with this failure all the time. This is a very American play. Martha’s father is the President of the private university he founded (and as George remarks, has made millions out of it and its students.) His patronage is vital to anyone’s career – but not his son in law’s. After a Presidential party where he presided “like a white mouse’ as George has it with his red eyes, white hair and nasty snout,’ Martha invites a couple home. It is two in the morning and the drinks trolley is seldom still as the couples sink booze on an eye watering, mind shattering level. (You will honestly never see drinking and its effects done better)
A row is already underway when the ‘kids’ arrive. Things go from bad to worse to outrageous as the hours slip by.
Catherine Ralston as Martha provides most of the breathtaking provocation. She is quite simply brilliant, tireless in her tirades, against George, super sexy in her seduction of her guest. This is a performance of a lifetime surely. The energy levels for this part are almost super-human, but Catherine Ralston brought flashes of self -doubt into the bullying taunts, and in the end, the bitter end, we begin to understand this wildly chaotic woman.
David John commands a possibly more complex role. Edward Albee reserves his best writing for this disenchanted philosophical victim of American capitalist competitiveness. His thoughtful historical mind is wasted in this go-getting campus – but the language he has to express his frustration emerges in a series of images, visions, dreams and allegories is guaranteed to keep you enthralled days after the play ends, or indeed forever.
Christian Burton is out and out stunning as the well-honed sporty Nick, amateur boxer, aspirant academic, new-age believer in scientific determinism. Albee riffs off this clash of culture. The ideas he allows to collide so brilliantly resonate sharply into our own era of AI and all its associated would-be progress.
Holly Masters as the ‘slim hipped’ wifey, whose father was an itinerant preacher and Man of God, who left her a fortune from the churches he founded (and it’s hinted, burned down), a phenomenon unknown to us but still a part of American society. So much of the play hinges on money and Honey, the brandy-swigging innocent in this ferocious turmoil of a party knows more than she lets on.
Director Lesley Ford has made of this celebrated twisted drawing room drama, a play for today. It is a fabulously set, brilliantly lit, celebration of theatre. Even the music was inspired from the Everly Brothers ‘So sad to watch good love go bad’ to the long finale of Ray Charles singing ‘ I can’t stop Loving you’ .earlier, Etta James ‘Don’t Blame Me’ and mysteriously Acker Bilk ‘Stranger on the Shore’. That it kicks off with a jaunty Connie Francis fifties number ‘Don’t Break the heart that loves you’ and the ominously darker ‘You really got a hold on me’ by the Miracles, all show the detail the intelligence and the reflection that has gone into this grotesque but utterly great drama. If you think you know this play, you don’t.
Don’t miss a chance to see a work as important for its time and ours as this fabulous production.
