An emotionally devastating depiction of lives staged, stories written and coping with truth that is too hard to bear.Rating
Excellent
This season sees Oxford Playhouse’s return to producing shows, under the leadership of Mike Tweddle. For his first production he’s chosen the classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Written by Edward Albee in 1962, it’s an entirely timely choice for today’s world, where the conflict between reality versus illusion seems to intensify daily, and delivers an emotive interrogation of the difficulty of coping with terrible truths.
Martha (Katy Stephens), is daughter of the College President and married to George (Matthew Pidgeon), an underachieving historian. Late into their marriage and disillusioned, they know each other too well and delight in provocation. A new tutor Nick (Ben Hall) and his wife Honey (Leah Haile) come for drinks, but quickly the sociable evening devolves into a toxic, combative maelstrom where rules are broken, veracity is challenged and illusion is ultimately exposed. The tale is enacted in a home bordered from floor to ceiling by books; rigidly academic, yet self-consciously edged with dramatic velvet curtains. It’s a background that speaks of storytelling, and what better place for that activity than a stage? Liz Ascroft’s clever design hints at invented fictions, staged lives and uncertain truth.
Tweddle’s precision direction embraces the theatrical, creating a home bursting with domestic drama. He crafts a constant, uneasy sense of things being illusory, unreal or at times absurd, with Martha and George crossing boundaries into the reality of the auditorium and marking the artifice of the lives they’re performing onstage. Each of the characters is constantly shifting, portraying multiple, raw behaviours, ripped from within themselves as complicated relationships and tensions clash. We’re never sure who is good, bad or otherwise, but all are flawed humans. The pressure builds steadily over three acts, creating relentless inescapability before climaxing in a heartbreaking and affecting finish.
Stephens and Pidgeon give dazzling performances, dragging us mercilessly through the emotional turmoil of Martha and George’s marriage. Power swings between them from second to second as they manipulate each other and their guests, leaving us unsure where we stand. Stephens’ tour de force performance is demanding and charged with Vaudevillian energy. She shows Martha as performative – almost slapstick at times – but also displays a side that is brutal, antagonising George and testing how far their guests will go. As Martha is crushed by the weight of emerging truths, it’s only at the conclusion that we finally come to understand her and the reason for her fantasising, with a hugely emotive, affecting delivery by Stephens.
Pidgeon is masterful as George, who is seemingly powered by resentfulness and cruelty, manipulating and humiliating those around him through peculiar games. Yet, emerging from his otherwise devastatingly cruel behaviour comes an unexpected, malformed kindness towards Martha. Hall and Haile as the unsuspecting guests are excellent; splendid foils to the powerful protagonists as their own frailties are exposed by the unfolding drama where nothing is as it seems.
The finer details of the show add discreet depth to an already rich production, from a single lamp lighting up a typewriter – a creator of stories – metaphorically extinguished and dressed with funereal flowers, to Max Pappenheim‘s subtle soundtrack, which creates an insidious, chilling edge, or emphasises the hollow nature of an emotionally unstable world. Language and themes additionally pierce the play with an unsettling thread of the abnormal, referencing animals linked to human behaviour or portraying society’s normalisation and acceptance of both physical and mental illness.
This is play that calls into question truth – how we live with it or choose to reframe it, and Tweddle’s vision makes it an active investigation. With the addition of a hugely talented cast, an already powerful play is here made extraordinary.
Written by Edward Albee
Directed by Mike Tweddle
Design by Liz Ascroft
Sound Design/Composed by Max Pappenheim
Lighting Design by Ashley Bale
Lighting Design by Will Hayman
Fight and Intimacy Director: Yarit Dor
Produced by Oxford Playhouse
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? runs at Oxford Playhouse until Saturday 7 March
