This evening I joined an old friend from Oxford and her sister for a preview performance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, recently transferred to London at the Apollo from its run on the other side of the Atlantic. By the grace of a patchy education, I had somehow managed to avoid having had to read the Albee playtext in high school or college and interpret it for literary symbolism; what did surprise me was that my friend and her sister, neither of whom are exactly intellectual slouches, had also escaped similar fates; as well as the equal or worse one, that of having had to watch an amateur performance of it.
Since the play is more or less established as canon, I don't expect to see any of the reviews in the weekend papers to have any comments on Albee's work as a piece of theatre (it was written and first produced in 1962). They'll probably focus on Kathleen Turner's (of Jewel of the Nile fame, as well as the somewhat more thematically related War of the Roses) and Bill Irwin's performances, and manage perhaps to cram in a few snippy remarks about how London theatre is being overrun by America (which I'd agree with, though not being British this fact is of interest but not frustration for me).
But the upshot of this mysterious gap in our literary education was that we entered the Apollo with no expectations; it could have been the latest Patrick Marber. And since Kathleen Turner was unrecognizable in her new blimp-like incarnation, we didn't feel we were watching a film star doing a career-saving stage turn. We went in fresh; and it was a fresh play that was delivered to us.
The fact that the claustrophobic one-room set, that doesn't change over the course of three acts that take place in "real-time" (it supposedly begins around two in the morning, and ends as dawn breaks), was contemporary to the original time setting of the play (phonograph records instead of CDs), was for the most part incidental and quickly forgotten. (I am glad though that no attempt was made to change the setting to the look of the present-day; that would just have been tiresome.) Quick summary of the performances: flawless, empassioned; absolutely intense. But because we did not know how the play would turn out or what it was thematically "about", we were watching it as theatre, without the emotional detachment of, say, the umpteenth staging of Hamlet. The violence of the language, as well as the physical violence, were perhaps not as shocking to us as it would have been to an audience in the early sixties, but the emotional impact of the George's smashing a bottle and his attempt to throttle his wife were unmitigated and unexpected. And as the play built itself up to its inevitable climax, we were squirming in our seats; the final fifteen minutes left N in tears (okay, and I as well); and the last few lines of the play had our skin crawling.
We wandered around the West End in a shell-shocked state for some time, feeling as though we had been put through an emotional wringer. I can't imagine how the actors go through this every night; perhaps they're such pros that after the curtain goes down they all traipse off to the pub nonplussed, but we felt we were in dire need of a medicinal amount of alcohol, and quickly downed a bottle of Argentinian red. (Yes, despite my recent mishap; but that was a particularly malevolent Gewurztraminer and was before dinner...don't trust the German winemakers, my grandfather used to say during the war...)
I did some rather belated homework about the play and its supposed intentions, and received more than a mild surprise. This is definitely a production that benefits from one's *not* having read the lecture notes. If you have the blessing of ignorance, as we did, get yourself to Shaftesbury Avenue and watch it as a piece of theatre. The emotional beating is a sadomasochistic treat, and the intellectual rewards are an incidental counterpoint.
