Rattling the cages of the imprisonment that an unhappy 23-year-long marriage imposes on its participants and the brutal survival strategies they employ to keep each other on their toes, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fires a series of explosive warning shots across the bows of modern marriage. Here, in all their gory glory, are the mental and verbal abuse and the physical violence and infidelities that a couple calculatedly bestow on each other. | "Turner may have had young Benjamin for romantic mincemeat in her stage debut as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, but this time the stakes are even higher" | | Mark Shenton |
To therefore call Albee's play a comedy may strike one as perverse; but there isn't a more bruisingly funny drama in London at the moment. For this is the comedy of rage rather than compassion, and it's fired expertly by a cast led by Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin as the husband and wife who draw a much younger, newly-married couple into their agonising games on a long night's journey into the hell of a marriage sustained only by mutual contempt. still-vampish allure Turner may have had young Benjamin Braddock for romantic mincemeat in her London stage debut as Mrs Robinson five years ago in The Graduate.
 | | Helpless: Mireille Enos |
But this time the stakes are even higher as she turns her still-vampish allure on the young biology teacher who has come to teach at the same University where her husband George is in the history department, while both her cuckolded husband and the teacher's mousey wife look helplessly on. Anthony Page's production, orchestrating the action like a dark symphony, was first seen on Broadway last year, and the entire original cast have transferred here with David Harbour and Mireille Enos as the younger couple. In the process, they bring an authentically American atmosphere that makes it both funnier and more terrifying than any version of this play I have previously seen. Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is at the Apollo Shaftesbury, Shaftesbury Avenue W1. Tickets: £17.50 - £45 (£2.50 booking fee). Box office: 0870 890 1101 | 
