Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, @Sohoplace
Friday 2nd October 2026
Confession is a crazy critter. Isn’t it? I confess that the last time I saw a show at this venue was a year ago: it was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a stage adaptation of a book whose film version memorably starred Richard Burton. Now I’m here again watching a stage play whose film version likewise starred Burton — and Elizabeth Taylor. Giving this confessional drama their all this time it’s superstars Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup, in a terrific revival directed by Marianne Elliott. No need to confess that this is an exhilarating evening, despite some mild reservations.
First staged on Broadway in 1962, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is Edward Albee’s masterpiece, an excoriating live wire of a situation that fuses together marital conflict with a critical snarl about the state of American life. Set in a New England liberal arts college, the story takes place in the living room of George (Crudup) and Martha (Anderson), whose names echo those of US founding father Washington and his wife. Albee’s character is a 46-year-old history professor whose lack of cut-throat ambition angers his spouse, the daughter of the college president. One night, as they return from a faculty party, Martha announces that a younger couple, Nick and Honey, are coming over — he’s an up-and-coming biologist new to the college.
Like so many pioneering plays by Harold Pinter, what happens next is a complex struggle over territory, both intellectual and emotional, as — fuelled by enormous amounts of booze — both couples try to assert their social and personal positions. It’s basically one helluva smash up: George and Martha are already blazing, and the youngsters add increasingly unexpected splashes of gasoline onto the flames. Central to the fiery exchanges is the notion that the older couple are playing a game: George explicitly talks about mind-games like “Humiliate the host”, “Get the guests” and “Hump the hostess”. And Albee’s deliberately ambiguous text constantly begs the question: how much of this is real?
Elliott and designer Miriam Buether’s production places a slowly revolving circular stage within @Sohoplace’s in-the-round space, emphasizing the drama’s intimacy and the complicity, if not voyeurism, of the audience. The clashes between the characters, which include competition between the men, martial revelations and frayed tempers, are written with a precise cruelty and emotional heft. Within minutes of a show that lasts more than three hours, outward social appearances are ripped away, discarded like so many overcoats or jackets. What’s exposed is the childlessness of the two women, each of whom reacts in a different way to this condition, and the bravado of the men, who really can’t live up to the mythological status of the tough male of the early 1960s. Nobody finishes the night unscathed.
As directed by Elliott, Anderson and Crudup do full justice to the subtleties of Albee’s play, which is so much more nuanced than the roaring fight of legend. Anderson first comes onto the stage, elongating the syllables of words like “dis-con-tent”, but her declaration to her husband that “You make me puke” soon slides into some skittish flirting. Crudup responds with a mix of bewildered looks and hip-swaying sexiness. The arrival of the youngsters — played by Josh Dyland, making his stage debut, and Phoebe Horn — changes the dynamics, with Honey getting rapidly legless and Nick rapidly competitive.
As the play moves through its three acts, the comparatively harmless Fun and Games becoming the increasingly deep and dark Walpurgisnacht and The Exorcism, Anderson’s Martha descends into despair, but not before doing some hip-thrusting jazz dancing with Dyland’s Nick, while Horn’s Honey sways pretentiously to Beethoven. As everyone gets increasingly drunk and savage, Anderson seems to be more comfortable in her more quiet and witty moments than in the rawest and most impassioned passages of the text. It’s Crudup who performs best, his subtly delivered George being a person who hides behind a whole series of roles, emerging only occasionally with his fangs showing.
When Martha descends into self-recriminations, Anderson is very touching, but the energy is mainly with Crudup, whose growling vengeance emerges convincingly from his humiliation, while she often strikes me as a bit lightweight, even though she “wears the pants” in their marriage. By contrast, Nick’s traditionally domineering masculinity gets a few spot-on challenges from Honey, made reckless, as well as sadly vulnerable, by drink. As Martha begins to crawl around the set, and Honey melts all over the furniture, the two men also face their inner demons: who will emerge the stronger? See the show to find out!
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not only a spattered portrait of two marriages, but also a vivid, even lurid, picture of the state of conformity in 1950s America, the decade the characters grew up in. Martha’s ambitions in a society of stay-at-home wives living through competitive husbands runs into the sands of George’s literary disappointments, and both use drink to rub out their complex feelings about children. While Nick and Honey are much younger, they seem to be on the same path: unknown to all of them, salvation will, by the end of the decade, be offered by feminism and the alternative society. How they would react to these changes is obviously unknowable, but, I must confess, it’s only one of many thoughts provoked by this superb, and superbly acted, revival.
This review first appeared on The Arts Desk
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at @Sohoplace until 19 December.
