Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? review: Gillian Anderson stars in the classic play

★★★★★

I don’t think @sohoplace is the perfect venue. Nowhere with that name could be. But I do think it is the perfect venue for a production of Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

Certainly it goes without saying that any play starring Gillian Anderson could run in a much bigger theatre. But Marianne Elliott’s in-the-round production is so intimate – not to mention intense – that after a while the thrill of Anderson and her co-star Billy Crudup being a couple of metres away is replaced by a sort of horror, a sense that we are not simply watching events from a distance, but are physically in the room for the madness.

It’s also a nice USP for a revival of an all-time classic that has a pretty much definitive film version and also gets a West End revival something like once a decade (Imelda Staunton did it in 2017; Kathleen Turner in 2006).

Miriam Buether’s living room set is both an impressively tasteful collection of high-end mid-twentieth century ergonomic design and somewhat ominous, its unnaturally circular shape giving it a claustrophobic retro futuristic spaceship feel, its distant doorway the airlock 

The living room belongs to George (Crudup) and Martha (Anderson), a history professor at a mid-tier American university, and his wife, who is the daughter of the college’s president. Alone together in the opening scene, they bicker and snipe. But that’s nothing compared to the hell they unleash when George’s new younger colleague Nick (Josh Dylan) and his wife Honey (Phoebe Horn) swing by for a profoundly ill-advised late night drink. 

If Anderson is good, Crudup is sensational. 

Anderson is very good as a brassy Martha with an inch-thick Brooklyn accent that implicitly codes her as less WASP-ish, more working class than usual. It doesn’t mean she is working class – it’s made very clear Martha comes from privilege – but her harsh, ponderous delivery gives her a vulnerable, unvarnished edge and even an air of sincerity. Which is discombobulating because as the night wears on it becomes increasingly apparent that George and Martha are playing some sort of bizarre game, verbally flagellating each other in front of their guests with a mix of truths and lies, while also slyly wheedling deeply personal secrets out of the hapless Nick and Honey. 

If Anderson is good, Crudup is phenomenal. The US character actor has been a West End fixture of late, with his solo show Harry Clarke and that odd stage version of High Noon. Neither were particularly amazing, but I think that’s more because neither was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, not any fault of Crudup as an actor. Here he is tremendous as the at first urbane, likeable George, who seems like the milder, more sophisticated partner to the coarser, angrier Martha. Squint and he’s the victim in the marriage. But as the night wears on, there’s something sinister about his self-containment and his inability to match Martha’s outbursts: his restraint becomes ominous and nakedly manipulative as he prods and probes at a drunken Nick, spinning him fanciful stories and savouring each drop as he gets the dirt on the young couple’s marriage. Crupud is a model of restraint and nuance and that just makes his George all the more sinister – a virus quietly infecting everyone else's brains. 

The question of what the hell George and Martha are up to and moreover why is intentionally opaque. Yes, there are significant hints regarding trauma in their pasts. But is any of it real? In Crudup’s hypnotically off-kilter take, George is as enigmatic as Christopher Nolan’s Joker: we’re given hints at a traumatic ‘true’ backstory but Albee pointedly refuses to verify any of it. I was left with a sense that Crudup’s George was largely an avatar of Western jadedness. Maybe a sociopath too, maybe not. But where some bored clever people like to get spanked in dungeons or jump out of planes, he does… whatever the hell this is. 

Toss in a couple of solid performances from younger Brits Dylan and Horn – he is particularly good as a brittle, obnoxious Nick – and you‘ve got something very special: Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? filtered and distilled and thrust in our faces. We’re only silent observers, but the sense that we’re not only watching this nightmare but living through it in real time is almost too much to bear.

@sohoplace, until Dec 19. Sold out but check website daily for returns.

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