Those who want to moan about the toxic reliance on celebrity casting and screen stars in the West End can stop right there: Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson both began their careers on stage. Here they are now, glittering up Edward Albee’s conflagration of a play about unhappy marriage and its necessary illusions, immortalised on screen by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Anderson and Crudup can hold their own against that landmark adaptation of the play about George, a middle-aged history professor with a sagging academic libido, and Martha, his frustrated, ceaselessly needling wife.
They are confident performers and it makes sense that this 1962 American classic about conjugal warfare is taken on by two Americans, albeit under the aegis of British directorial powerhouse Marianne Elliott. If Elliott’s previous production, Les Liasons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, had what some considered an anaemic connection between its leading lovers, there is no shortage of sparks and sparring for the central couple here. They are shouty and jousting, although it does not feel dangerous or emotionally eviscerating enough between them for rather too long.
Their night-long fight at home begins after a faculty party thrown by Martha’s university president father. The pair’s guests are a younger couple – biology academic Nick (Josh Dylan) and his wife, Honey (Phoebe Horn), who first watch Martha and George play their emotional games, then get sucked in. Elliott preserves the play’s original setting, with Miriam Buether’s set an elegant 1960s-era living room complete with the all-important drinks trolley.
The couples are drunk but intent on getting drunker, each refill raising the stakes. Anderson makes a formidably angry Martha as she needles away, poking George in every place it hurts. She is all hard edges and armour, agitating for a fight from the off, with a big, dirty laugh and a bawdy flirtation with Nick.
Crudup is put-upon, dusty, literally all (in) grey. He initially leads with passive aggression, mansplaining Martha’s behaviour to the room and batting off her barbs with intellectual superiority or sarcasm, before entering into more confrontational territory. It ends in hand-to-hand combat but before that, laughter is eked out of the first act, which emanates a deliberately upbeat lightening of tone.
George and Martha have more than a touch of George and Mildred, their game-playing a little cartoonish at times. The chemistry of rivalry and one-upmanship between the men is at first stronger. In between Nick and George’s Darwinian fight to be the bigger chest-beater, there is banter and a sharing of confidences – which in one of this production’s most brutal moments is used agonisingly against Nick and Honey.
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