Review
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Alberta Theatre Projects
Starring Valerie Ann Pearson, Brian Dooley, Ryan Luhning and Kira Bradley
Written by Edward Albee
Directed by Bob White
Runs until November 1
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Catching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the night after Agatha Christie is like following a virgin daiquiri with a triple shot of bourbon.
When it comes to theatre, this is the real stuff – potent and powerful. It may be 41 years old, but Edward Albee’s brilliant, scalpel-sharp anatomy of a marriage has aged well, without losing any of its savage humour and stinging insight.
Its impact survives intact in Bob White’s full-blooded revival for Alberta Theatre Projects, which boasts a cast of three trusty Calgary actors – Valerie Ann Pearson, Ryan Luhning and Kira Bradley – and one Edmonton dark horse, Brian Dooley, who turns out to be a stunning thoroughbred.
As George, the stuck-in-the-mud history prof, Dooley’s bravura portrayal has echoes of Richard Burton’s in the classic film, but with a stronger sense of shabby, middle-aged failure. Shlepping from sofa to bar, Dooley has the slumped shoulders of a man accustomed to life’s beatings and his wife Martha’s tongue-lashings, and delivers his lines in the muttering voice of a passive-aggressive.
Yet, as the play’s long, booze-fueled party progresses, he reminds us that it’s George who proves to be the sadistic master of the revels, gleefully initiating nasty little games that reduce his and Martha’s guests, the young couple Nick and Honey, to tears and rage, and finally rip apart the very fabric of illusion holding together his own sad marriage.
Pearson, sporting a leopard-print top and a bottomless glass of gin, gives a fine performance as Martha, although with less emphasis on the character’s vicious, vulgar vitality and more on her underlying disappointment with her husband and her life. "I am the Earth Mother," she declares with a weary laugh, "and you’re all flops."
Luhning is dead-on as Nick, the athletic young biology prof, radiating the blond, bland solidness of a guy used to dealing with facts, not elaborate fictions, while a prim-looking Bradley skilfully turns his drippy wife Honey from a soused figure of fun to a pathetic bundle of repressed fears.
This is one of those long dramas – like O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night – in which the length is integral to its effect, and White’s careful direction expertly reveals its slowly unfolding horrors. Scott Reid’s living-room set, tilted at a drunken angle, is a bit too small and nondescript, but both he and costume designer Jenifer Darbellay neatly evoke the early-’60s time period without over-emphasizing it.
Does Virginia Woolf fall outside ATP’s mandate to stage contemporary plays? Well, maybe – but mandate shmandate, White can go ahead and break the rules if it means giving us an excellent production of a masterpiece like this. |
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