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Laughter and terror with George and Martha

Since George and Martha first clawed their way into the collective consciousness of theatre and film audiences in the 1960s, these roles have been iconic — the envy of many actors, the pride of a select few.

You may be wondering: George and Martha who? Not George and Martha Washington (although the characters’ names do allude to the first American president and his wife, a satirical nod to the nation’s fondness for mythmaking when it comes to matrimony and the “dream” of domestic bliss).

In fact, George and Martha do not have a surname. While they have a specific social setting, in the claustrophobic environment of a small New England college, they also have an archetypal quality; they are the bickering couple in extremis. We meet them on the night that their repressed traumas are forced to the surface and the fantasies that have sustained their unhappy married life crumble entirely.

When playwright Edward Albee created George and Martha for his masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he gave them more than repartee. Albee crafted roles that require rapid shifts from eloquence to bawdiness, and from ironic wit to devastating vulnerability. Moments of high comedy are laced with the constant threat of violence.

The play is an intellectually and emotionally daunting (almost exhausting) experience just for the audience. The demands made on the performers are enormous.

Of course, the play is not just a two-hander. George and Martha have their younger counterparts in Nick and Honey, new arrivals in the university community who have been cajoled into joining George and Martha for late-night (early-morning) drinks after a faculty party.

The play’s frisson, its rising hedonistic energy as well as its false climaxes, is driven by a toxic combination of jealousy, pity, ambition and resentment in these mirrored couples.

Ultimately, however, Nick and Honey are foils to George and Martha. So it is hardly surprising that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an aspirational production; to take on the task of being George or Martha is to place oneself in exalted company.

The play was first staged on Broadway in 1962 with Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen in the main roles, but it was the film version directed by Mike Nichols four years later that caught the global public imagination.

Starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the film benefited from the tempestuous off-screen relationship of the celebrity couple; this blurring of life and art was secured the following year, when they played George and Martha’s Shakespearean precursors, Petruchio and Kate, in Franco Zeffirelli’s spectacular filmic treatment of The Taming of the Shrew.

Subsequent stage productions were not exactly in the Burton-Taylor shadow — some equally famous names would play George and Martha — but given that there is an epic quality to this thespian feat, each new duo has faced comparisons. Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner set the bar high with a Broadway revival in 2005.

The key production that followed this was here in SA in 2007, with Sean Taylor as George and Fiona Ramsay as Martha; it was a career highlight for these veteran performers (Nick Pauling and Erica Wessels were excellent as Nick and Honey). Taylor and Ramsay’s performances made such an impression on me then that I inevitably had them in mind as I prepared to watch the latest iteration of Albee’s magnum opus, which sees Alan Committie and Robyn Scott boldly taking up the torch under Sylvaine Strike’s expert direction.

Scott’s Martha, for instance, elicits more raucous laughter — from herself and from the audience — than Ramsay’s did. But she does not hold back in conveying Martha’s fluctuating anger and sorrow.

Committie’s George, in turn, is less vindictive than Taylor’s; he has fun, he is even briefly cruel, but there is a tenderness too, suiting Martha’s summary: “George and Martha ... sad, sad, sad.”

Sanda Shandu is a complex Nick, finding unspoken nuance in expression and gesture, while Berenice Barbier conveys a Honey who is more than just a ditsy wretch.

This fine production embraces the exaltation, brutality and disillusioning catharsis that Albee intended. ● Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town until October 8 and opens at the Pieter Toerien Theatre in Johannesburg on October 14.

LIFE

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2022-09-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://bd.pressreader.com/article/281775633037584

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