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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Uneasy quartet: Jasmine Hutchins as Honey, James McCabe as Nick, Julie-Ann Randell as Martha and Mark Crossley as George. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I don’t like Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?’ I ought to explain that it’s not Gordon
Vallins’ latest production (in the Loft’s celebrated centenary: it was
founded in 1922) which causes this. His cast of four – each and every
one of them - does a splendid job handling Edward Albee’s difficult,
unyielding, sometimes elusive script. One is full of admiration. During those hundred years The Loft has staged a
staggering number of plays and of playwrights – too many for me to
count. It is hugely impressive. The standards at the Loft are
consistently superb. Often, not just occasionally, their stagings come
up to professional, or near-professional, standards. This quality makes
them, virtually every time, a treat to witness. They have staged an Edward Albee play once before
– in 2007: Three Tall Women (1994), which won Albee his third
coveted Pulitzer prize - after A Delicate Balance (1967) and
Seascape (1975) - and was, as so often, quite a bold choice of play
by the Loft. The greatest load here falls on George, the
forty-plus University lecturer who holds, and hides from his wife
Martha, a terrible undivulged secret (Woolf – is its usual version,
Wolf: could it conceal a symbol of a threatening hidden truth?) George bears the largest role in this Three Act
marathon, and Mark Crossley, saddled with and undefeated by a massive
(and sometimes, it feels, endless) script – not a single faltering -
acute and sometimes explosive, achieves marvellous characterisation from
the first moment when we witness his sheer boredom, escaping to a
newspaper while his wife Martha (Julie-Ann Randell) chatters away
exhaustingly; how possibly could one live with, let alone love, such a
tiresome, impossible woman? Yet this hopeful characteristic declines; it
is not used.
The climax of the play is George’s revelation –
finally, to his wife - that their son (unnamed, unless at the end) has
been killed in a road accident, driving into a tree late one afternoon.
Although George does, unfaithfully, spill the truth of this appalling
fact to a third character, it is the end exchange with Martha, and a few
concluding moments which feel like a kind of resolution or
reconciliation, that the play reaches its delayed, somewhat tiresomely
built close. Just perhaps, this shared loss will bring this combating
pair back together. Earlier, despite their husband-wife unkindness
(‘don’t spring things on me the way you always do’) and banter, George
is in a sense a reconciler. At one moment he terms Martha ‘a remarkable
woman’, and at another ‘a monster’, and adds I’m going to have you
committed’; ‘I’m going to rip you to pieces.’ ‘You’re spoilt,
self-indulgent and dirty minded’. Can this marriage possibly be
reignited? One thing to point out is the soliloquies. Each
or most of the characters – George, Martha and one of their two hapless
guests, youngish Nick (James McCabe) – have one or two gripping and
gratifying solo turns. But it is the unwitting prolonged, penultimate,
powerfully affectionate memory and recollections by Randell’s Martha of
their son’s childhood that surely hits the solar plexus most powerfully
and awesomely. To be honest, all these soliloquies in Vallins’ intense
staging which invite or draw one in, has such a potent impact managing
both to hold back the development, to great advantage, as well as
somehow to move it on and lend it weight and dynamism. These were
absolute highlights, each time.
What of the other two unsuspecting visiting
characters, Nick and his young wife Honey (Jasmine Hutchings); they are
aged 28 and 26 respectively, and as yet childless; George’s sneery
probing cross-examination of Nick about this surely relates to his own
concealment, now childless himself. McCabe’s alternating fascination,
attention to, absorption by George’s verbal and emotional batterings and
notably unfair pumping interrogations are richly rewarding. He shows
respect. He shows anger. When Nick is meanly pushed into blowing up, and
he is compelled to do so quite a lot, it is perfectly believable, and it
contributes to the variables and contrasts in this four-hander play. His
care and concern for his wife is moving, and their close loving
relationship is admirably caught.
Yet even more convincing and entrancingly varied,
and laughable – are Honey’s hilariously, and increasingly, drunken
antics. They are at odds with her wonderful costume, which is a lemon
yellow which fabulously underlines her glorious, touching innocence. She
arrives in yellow coat, dress, shoes, even underwear. But it’s
Hutchings’ endless movements and gestures, at times twitches almost,
that make this such an affecting – and effective – performance. She is constantly looking sideways for
reassurance from her husband; she looks down when she’s embarrassed or
troubled. Every part of her seems called into play: her by turns
enraptured, puzzled and disapproving eyes; her shifting head, her
twisting neck, her nervous crossing of legs or just shoes. When she gets
increasingly intoxicated, her gauche behaviour is frolicking, whimsical
and gambolling. In short, she is huge fun to behold.
Inevitably Albee uses exits, or double exits – a common technique, of course - in such a way as to enable two characters to remain on stage. Thus, he creates a series of duets, and to a degree it is these twosomes – several tetchy bouts of George versus Nick, in particular - which one found compelling.
Attrition, abjection, attraction, perhaps even affection between George and Martha At the very least, it generates telling contrasts
in this four-character stage piece. At the most, these are telling and
absorbing, at times almost captivating and engrossing, if a fraction
riveting almost; but only almost. So, what are these reservations I alluded to at
the start? Especially in a play that has won such awards and eminent
critics’ firm approval? I think the play is too long. Possibly far too
long. There is not enough content to hold one rapt. The fact that the
two secondary characters stay rather than leave is scarcely believable.
Crossley’s marvellous George is a character drawn the same throughout:
despite the twosomes, there is little variation in the text for him. He
is harping on in virtually the same way all the way through. The tension is not adequately built. The various
exchanges take us away from what is to be the final revelation. If one
thinks of Arthur Miller - All My Sons, for instance – in Joe Keller
there is an underplay of risk and impending danger, of suspicion,
apprehension and wariness throughout the play. Something is always about
to go wrong. There are lies. The jokes ring hollow. And unlike here. we
are always building, inexorably, towards its grim denouement. Herein lies another criticism, for me, of this
play. The more the tension, the more humour can help. Who’s Afraid is
strikingly short on gags. Despite George’s sometimes acidic asides or
confrontations, or such badinage as Albee intrudes into the text, the
almost non-existent jokes (Martha: I’m necking with one of the guests;
George ‘That’s good; which one?) there is a sameness about the whole
story. Largely it is devoid of humour. And sameness can denote dullness.
Who’s Afraid is a dull play, the interactions have something to offer
but surely not enough. Kim Green’s interior domestic set, with red,
purple and crimson flats, makes an appreciated impression. But here is a
play, or a version, in which the same gradually more boring interior
ultimately detracts. What does work well, almost continuously on must
assert, is Gordon Vallins’ careful and studied moving of his characters.
At times it might be dubbed eloquent, for usually it relates well – not
arbitrarily – to the section of text in hand.
But despite the valiant efforts – and
achievements – of Director and actors – no fault of theirs - this play
trundles along, but never takes off. Perhaps the Burton-Taylor 1966 film
contrived to create more tension; possibly a lot more; maybe the play’s
1962 Broadway premiere generated a lot more. The Loft, which one so
admires, has - needless to say - delivered a plucky and audacious
production of what, to me, and my apologies for saying it, is a flawed
and, unhappily, unconvincing play.
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