Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Edward Albee was highly prescriptive about how his plays were cast and staged, as was his estate after he died in 2016. And nowhere was this more so than with this famous American all white classic of the 1960’s.

So it’s a happy surprise director Margaret Harvey was able to cast three actors of colour with one Anglo Australian in this State Theatre Company SA update  – adding race to lurk in the gladiatorial epic between the four this one drunken night.

It’s all normal game-playing viciousness for George (Jimi Bani), a history academic with little success, and his braying wife Martha (Susan Prior), privileged (white) daughter of the university’s president.  Inexplicably drawn into the game are their younger, late night guests, the handsome new academic Nick (Rashidi Edward) and his unworldly wife Honey (Juanita Navas-Nguyen).

Their battling is on Ailsa Paterson’s minimalist white set of glass, surrounded by a minor moat. With distracting side walls of chalkboard scrawled with the play’s title, the chilly design creates more distance than empathy for these flawed humans.   

And it’s a long play, of more than three hours with two intervals, and here strangely placeless. With no US accents, Harvey wants her multiracial cast to speak to Australian social issues, but it unavoidably belongs back in that New England small town university.  Such is the power of Albee’s writing (and his estate!).

Bani’s George has an irrepressible bonhomie in defence but lacks the necessary toxic cynicism, and Prior, while commanding, doesn’t fully let rip with all Martha’s alcoholic bile.  

Edward and Navas-Nguyen bring welcome new readings to the junior couple, and

Albee’s script bends well to more explicit racial perspectives

Martin Portus

Photographer: Yaya Stempler