Theatre Review: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

Published on Thursday 5 March 2009 19:05

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? **** DUNDEE REP

The playwright Edward Albee, 81 this year, has lived his own great American life-story. Born in Virginia in 1928, Albee was adopted as a baby by a millionaire businessman and his wife; but his relationship with his adoptive parents failed, and Albee left home, to become a furious critic of the lies, secrets and sterilities that sometimes lie beneath the smiling surface of the American dream.

His mighty 1962 domestic epic Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is a funny, tragic, and heartrending portrait of two powerful and loving people – academic historian George, and his wife Martha – all but destroyed by their own barrenness, and by the great shrieking void it has left in their lives; a void filled only by drink, and by their own theatrical and savage rows. And although there is nothing initially spectacular about James Brining's new Dundee Rep production, it matures into a superb evening of theatre, illuminated by two stunning performances, from the great Irene Macdougall as Martha, and Robert Paterson as George.

Martha's emotional fireworks and drunken lusts are familiar elements in our culture, made famous by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1966 film of the play. In this production, though, Martha finds her absolute equal in Paterson's lethally intelligent George; and the sheer weight of Paterson's performance also pays off in his superb scenes with Alan Burgon as Nick, the young academic who – with his fragile wife – becomes the audience for George and Martha's emotional war to the death.

Philip Whitcomb's design is quietly breathtaking, a standard academic living room marooned against a great dark sky, on a rubbish-heap of empty bottles and disappointed hopes. It's the greatness of this play that it shows us the life and death of a whole civilisation through the failed lives of these two magnificent people; and it's the achievement of Brining's spine-shiveringly powerful production that, despite an occasional dip in pace and focus, it captures that wider dimension of the play, and delivers it to us with steadily accumulating force.

&#149 Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is at Dundee Rep until 21 March