Review: WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINA WOOLF?, Starring Gillian Anderson & Billy Crudup

Actors start your engines. Edward Albee’s masterpiece for four lives and dies on the horsepower of its performers. Albee does not batter you with ideological interrogation. Its sparks fly from watching it performs smash and bash into each other, lashing each other with venomous cruelty in one breath, then licking each other’s wounds in the next. If this is a psychological demolition derby of a play, then Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup are monster trucks roaring with ferocity.

George is a middle-aged historian in a quiet Eastern seaboard university, failing to live up to the expectations of his wife Martha and her father’s reputation as de facto the head of the university. The two are stranded in a toxic co-dependent relationship, years of hatred have worn them to the bone. She delights in torturing him with his inadequacy, his failing career and failed novel. He retaliates in kind, hurling her sadism back at her. The line between victim and perpetrator is imperceptible, but there is a remnant of their love, somewhere in the eye of the storm.

After a faculty party a young couple invited to their house late drinks only to be ensnared in their war of emotional attrition. Albee gently suggests that they are mirror images: the young couple’s apple-pie-cooling-on-the-window-sill marriage is not the American utopia as it seems, seemingly destined to decay into a childless and bile-filled union like George and Martha.

Crudup and Anderson have a tight grip on each undulation, never over-peppering the seething anger, never underplaying their nearly forgotten attraction. He bobs up and down like a Gerry Anderson marionette, arms gangly, barely in control of his own limbs. Anderson is balletic, sunken cheeks frame an angular permascowl, pupils darting towards George with each snarl as if they were hurling javelins towards him.

Phoebe Horn and Josh Dylan hold their own as the young couple, she a gaggling drunk melting over the furniture, he tightly wound by sexual repression – you can sense the void beneath their smarmy toothy-grinned facades materialise. Conductor-like Marianne Elliot keeps the tempo taut with staccato direction. Miriam Buther’s set enhances the claustrophobia. Performed in the round, you can see the whites of the casts’ eyes turn red with rage.

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?'s gleeful assassination of American family dynamics would have shocked its audiences more in 1962 than today. The barbarism remains perversely entertaining, but what lies beneath for an audience to get its teeth into? Perhaps the anxiety of relationships, which in the age of social media loneliness and situationships weighs heavier. But maybe best not to overthink it. Come for Anderson and Crudup going toe to toe. Stay for the ensuing blood, sweat, and tears.

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? plays @sohoplace until 19 December