George and Martha, whose marathon battles we watch with appalled fascination, derive their names from the Washingtons. It was Howard Davies’s magnificent Almeida production that fully awoke me to the fact that the play, apart from being about the stock American theme of truth and illusion, has even wider resonance. It is also significant that he wrote the play in the early 1960s when America was slowly emerging from the narcoleptic Eisenhower years and when a fragile Cold War peace depended on the balance of terror.ĭavid Suchet (George) and Diana Rigg (Martha) in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf at the Almeida in 1996. Albee was a deeply political writer who once told me he liked plays to be “useful, not merely decorative”. But the play, I am convinced, is as much about the state of the Union as about marriage.
The searing Mike Nichols 1966 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, stamped it in the public mind as a liquor-fuelled marital slugfest. Albee’s mounting dismay at the British actor’s textual quibbles meant that, by the end of a long afternoon, all hopes of the production had been abandoned.Īlbee’s protective attitude to his play stemmed in part, I suspect, from the fact that it is widely misunderstood.
I was recently told of a brilliant British actor who was summoned to Albee’s New York apartment for a reading of the play prior to an intended Broadway production with Patti LuPone.
Yet Albee exercised fierce control over all productions.