Edward Albee’s “stone-cold masterpiece” about marital despair, and life’s necessary illusions, was first staged in 1962 – and it is as riveting now as it was then, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph.
That is partly because the “ritualised savagery” exhibited by George and Martha – the middle-aged couple who have invited a younger faculty member and his wife to their home on a college campus for after-party drinks – “points to a broader spiritual malaise in middle-class America that feels darker and more resonant with each passing decade”.
But it is also because Albee’s writing lets actors fly, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup are so scintillating as the drink-sodden pugilists that “you check yourself for bruises as you stagger out”. Staged in the round with the audience ringside, Marianne Elliott’s sublime production is “shockingly good”.
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“I don’t think @sohoplace is the perfect venue. Nowhere with that name could be,” said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. But it is the perfect venue for this magnificent play. As the action deepens, and we realise that what is unfolding is a twisting game, the thrill of having Anderson and Crudup just feet away is “replaced by a sort of horror, a sense that we are not simply watching events from a distance but are physically in the room for the madness”. It is a “special” theatrical experience.
Anderson is “wonderful” as the ferocious, fragile Martha, the part for which Elizabeth Taylor won her second Oscar, said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. And Crudup is really terrific – wry, relaxed, dangerous – as her disappointed husband. If he doesn’t scoop an Olivier for this, “I will be astonished”.
Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn are “compelling”, too, as the guests-cum-victims Nick and Honey, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. There’s more humour in this staging than in others I’ve seen and, to my taste, not enough darkness and “emotionally eviscerating” moments along the way. But the ending is as “devastating” as ever.
@sohoplace, London W1. Until 19 December.
