Edward Albee’s 1962 drama of two academic couples boozing and bruising for four hours before dawn rings with boxing imagery. Young Nick from the biology department was a college middleweight champion. One of the (possibly unreliable) anecdotes with which underachieving history don George and wife, Martha, entertain their guests involves the couple once almost slugging it out during bouts run by her college president father. Only Nick’s wife, Honey, is temperamentally noncombative.
This pugilism is fitting because Albee’s vast, verbally violent play dates from the period in the middle third of the 20th century when American dramatists – Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Tennessee Williams and Albee – put their characters through 15 heavyweight rounds until bloodstained submission. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought a brutal bout dubbed the Thrilla in Manila; George and Martha contest the Carnage in New Carthage, Albee’s fictional east coast college town.
This Leicester revival is sponsored by De Montfort University, although its staff would soon be suspended if they copied almost any moment in the play. Alcoholics Anonymous might be a better corporate partner; over three hours, the four actors get through numerous bottles of stage booze. The departures for the bathroom that Albee gives every character, while primarily a dramatic contrivance to leave people alone to fight or flirt, may also have practical benefits for actors.
Although Albee’s situations tend to be domestic and marital, he was tangibly a cold war dramatist. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened during the Cuban missile crisis and that drama and the arguably superior A Delicate Balance (1966), in which a terrified couple seek sanctuary with their friends, contain a strong sense of the possibility of civilisation ending, which pessimists may think gives topicality to the revival.
Cara Nolan’s production has an appropriately apocalyptic feel on a set by Amy Jane Cook where the vast blood-red front door to George and Martha’s campus home suggests a portal to hell. As the infernal hosts, Cathy Tyson and Patrick Robinson, vividly illustrating the couple’s lethal co-dependency, are so equally powerful that boxing judges would call a draw.
Tyson shows Martha struggling to hold herself imperiously and seductively even as the booze makes movement perilous. Between the misogynistic one-liners that draw audience gasps, Robinson throws poignant flashes of the attractive brain and heart washed away by disappointment and liquor. As the other couple, roles that involve a lot of nervous listening, George Kemp and Tilly Steele start out with super clean clothes and souls that seem deliberately to invoke Ken and Barbie finding themselves in a scenario more Hammer than Mattel.
Albee’s dialogue is often musical, both in contrasting male and female tones but also alternating pieces for two, three and four voices. The cast rises magnificently to this, especially in the demanding finale when a tragic-comic quartet is followed by a devastating duet. Albee’s fights – male v female, history v biology, fantasy v reality – are undoubtedly a knockout here.
