Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup give towering performances in Edward Albee's intense 1962 drama, about a middle-aged couple engaged in vicious, liquored-up psychological games to hide the core sadness of their marriage. Marianne Elliott's production turns a mid-century modern living room (by the ever-excellent Miriam Buether) into a slowly revolving gladiatorial arena, perfect for this in-the-round venue. At three hours and 20 minutes it doesn't stint on the methodical savagery.
Two Actors at the Top of Their Game
The shifting dynamics and brutally funny repartee of the central couple are immaculately mapped. Anderson is as good as you'd hope and expect as the bleary, destructive Martha, but Crudup is a revelation as George, wounded but quick-witted and nimble, like a greying mongoose battling a striking snake. After the London misfires of his solo show Harry Clarke and a prattling, musical High Noon, we finally see what the Broadway fuss was about.
Albee, who died in 2016, considered this early, Tony award-winning work flawed, even juvenile, and was irked by the shadow it cast over his later, bracingly metaphysical works. (The 1966 film version, which fed vampirically off the drunken marital strife of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, didn't help.) The young couple enlisted as witnesses and weapons by George and Martha are sketchily drawn and passive, though given texture here by Phoebe Horn and Josh Dylan. There's also a plausibility issue. But as a vehicle for two splendid actors to go the full nine rounds of emotional extremes, Who's Afraid is peerless.
The Plot Unfolds
It begins with the central duo returning, rankled, from a faculty party at the regional college where Martha's father is president and George works in the history department. The first of countless strong drinks are poured. (Anyone trying to match the characters glass for glass here, as some do with Withnail and I, would surely require hospitalisation before Act 2.) Their chafing has a tired, long-wed edge. Until, that is, Martha announces she's invited new biology lecturer Nick and his ditzy wife Honey back for nightcaps, at daddy's behest.
Galvanized by an audience, Martha ramps up the belittlement she heaps on George. He parries, retrenches and re-engages. When left alone with Nick, he runs mental rings around the younger man, trapping him into unwise admissions – under Elliott's direction, it seems George is storing up ammunition, knowing how his wife will use this young stud-muffin as the evening progresses. Sure enough, Martha performs a grotesque seduction of Nick while Honey becomes steadily more inebriated. She mocks George's sexual prowess, his lack of professional ambition, and a tragedy that may or may not have happened in his past. In an otherwise ostensibly realistic play, the shifting nature of truth foreshadows Albee's more experimental later works.
Anderson and Crudup Shine
Anderson is magnificent here, first in a cocktail dress and then in cigarette pants and button-straining angora. Her Martha is lean and hard, with a raptor's gimlet eye, unsentimental in the deployment of her fading glamour. She has a particular, calculated shimmy. As in her 2014 performance in Streetcar Named Desire (which won her a Standard Best Actress award) and her last London stage role in All About Eve, she refuses to submit to the actor's vice of wanting to be liked. “I'm loud and vulgar… but I'm not a monster,” Martha declares. And she's not. But it's close.
Crudup, in a shapeless flannel blazer and a swept-back cockade of hair, seems physically cowed but his eyes constantly dart for advantage. His delivery of George's acid responses is surgical, lethal. As Nick, Dylan declines from jockish swagger into the realisation that he's a plaything for predators. Horn suggests a measure of wilful steel beneath Honey's vacuity and is always in the moment, despite rarely being in focus.
These parts are underwritten and functional, and the central revelation – when it comes – seems too weak to support the torrid psychodrama. The slow, relentless slide of the last act, with Martha baby-talking and George incanting Latin, feels overegged. Never mind. This is a chance to see two actors at the top of their game, and at exhaustive, almost exhausting length. Until 19 December, sohoplace.org.
