First Night: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The veteran English director, Anthony Page, seems to be in the process of creating the theatrical equivalent of Mount Rushmore on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Already running at the Lyric, there’s his fine account of Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, starring Woody Harrelson. This has now been joined, next door at the Apollo, by the London transfer of his superb Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Kathleen Turner, which opened in triumph last night. All we need is an Arthur Miller drama at the Queen’s and a Eugene O’Neill epic at the Gielgud to complete the full presidential quartet.
Virginia Woolf is, of course, Albee’s “long night’s journey into day”. This booze-fuelled marital slug-fest on a New England campus harks back to Strindberg and Coward in its savagely comic take on love-hate co-dependency and on the coded, blithely conscienceless war-games that bamboozle and blister the scandalised, dullard civilians who are forced into participation.