In London, a Ferocious ‘Virginia Woolf’

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/arts/whos-afraid-virginia-woolf-edward-albee-london.html

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LONDON — “NOOOOOOoooooo.”

That elongated monosyllable hurtles from the stage of the Harold Pinter Theater near the end of the new London revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which opened on Thursday and looks quite likely to be the talk of the town during its limited run, through May 27.

As uttered by Imelda Staunton’s Martha, the shocked cry from the heart represents the climactic surrender of the ballsy, take-no-prisoners wife of an academic who isn’t quick to accept defeat.

So when her soft-spoken but scarily smart husband, George (Conleth Hill), joins her in game playing only to lift the stakes to newly lethal terrain, words fail Martha, for a change. All she can do at this point in their nightlong party-turned-wake is respond from somewhere cavernously deep within a bruised psyche. And the audience hangs on both sparring partners’ every breath.

This “Virginia Woolf” is by some measure the most searing London account of Edward Albee’s 1962 theatrical landmark I have seen. (The play’s last West End staging, in 2006, was a transfer of a very fine Broadway revival that starred Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin.) The director James Macdonald’s production serves additionally to commemorate its peerlessly gifted author, who died in September at age 88 and would, I suspect, have approved of the finely honed ruthlessness on view here.

While it is often said that the play’s emotionally upended couple will live to see another day — the three acts do, after all, conclude with the arrival of dawn — one can’t help but feel on this occasion that George and Martha have passed a point of no return; any retreat into a shared solace, however warped, looks unlikely. Sure, one of their guests, Nick (Luke Treadaway), may remark admiringly of his hosts’ gifts for repartee that “you two are pretty good, impressive,” but one is left aware that George and Martha’s codependency comes at a grievous price. If ever two people could be said to be alone together, here they are, an impetuous and lengthy shared kiss early on notwithstanding.

Mr. Macdonald’s staging looks and sounds different, too, not least because three of his four actors are physically cast against the usual types. Their shared task is to chronicle a fight to the finish that plays out on a notably faded, period-appropriate set from Tom Pye: Whatever spare cash George and Martha have has clearly gone toward keeping the liquor trolley full.

As Nick’s intoxicated spouse, Honey, the rising film actress Imogen Poots (“She’s Funny That Way,” “That Awkward Moment”) certainly looks the part of a faculty wife in over her head: a sweet-faced blonde adrift in a sea of savagery that she is just starting to understand by the time she and Nick take their leave. But Ms. Poots, to her immense credit, rescues the part from terminal giggliness to communicate a lost soul whose own tragedy is to have been betrayed by a husband who, one gathers from Mr. Treadaway’s cunning performance, can be as smug as he is solicitous.

A 2013 Olivier Award winner for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Mr. Treadaway is more physically slight than most Nicks, and one can’t quite imagine him as the football-playing jock indicated in the text. But there’s a casual chill cast by the ease with which he submits to Martha’s advances, Nick all the while thinking that it can’t hurt to have dallied with the daughter of the president of the university where he and George are on the faculty. In the end, of course, the joke is on Nick, who finds himself an abject recipient of Martha’s verbal whiplash.

Ms. Staunton’s last London stage appearance was her Olivier Award-winning turn as Momma Rose in “Gypsy,” another strong-willed American woman who is derided in some quarters as monstrous but who, like Martha, may simply be trying to salvage a sense of self from the apparent wreckage these ladies otherwise know as life. One assumes Martha to be physically imposing, on the order of Uta Hagen, who created the part, or Ms. Turner, who was marvelous in it. Instead, the diminutive Ms. Staunton brings to mind a tiny yet terrifying attack dog who indeed resembles the “little yum yum” spoken of by George and whose signature bray knows no limits — until George takes control and all bets are off. (Tapping his fingers on the armrest of the sofa, an ashen Mr. Hill hints at reserves of power awaiting their turn.)

Eight months on the West End scaling the heights of “Gypsy” surely constituted ideal training for this play’s distaff lead: Where some Marthas reach Albee’s third act like a balloon that is starting to leak air, Ms. Staunton gives off an indomitability that makes her evisceration near the end doubly startling. The matchless Mr. Hill, on furlough from his star-making role as Lord Varys on “Game of Thrones,” possesses a fleshiness that allows his entire body to go slack as he reels early on from the cumulative blows. (He also has the most unforced American accent of the foursome.)

Mr. Hill later re-enters the fray, though, with renewed power, like a combatant old beyond his years — George, we’re often reminded, is younger than Martha — and from first to last, he fields Albee’s signature wit with killer timing that makes one understand what these two surely once found in each other and, now and again, still do. If he and Ms. Staunton weren’t laying stealth bombs eight times a week, they’d surely be the funniest double act in town. As it is, the devastation in their wake is, for now anyway, beyond compare.

Ms. Staunton and Mr. Macdonald previously joined with Albee for a 2011 revival at north London’s Almeida Theater of “A Delicate Balance,” in which Ms. Staunton put to one side all thoughts of Elaine Stritch’s 1996 turn as the heavy-drinking sister, Claire. The same playhouse is currently housing a “Hamlet,” directed by its associate director, Robert Icke, and running through April 15, that prompts its own re-evaluation, this time of literature’s most abiding Dane.

As played by the ever-inventive Irish actor Andrew Scott (Jim Moriarty in television’s “Sherlock”) in a modern-dress staging complete with video screens, Bob Dylan songs and the sight of Ophelia (a whispery Jessica Brown Findlay) taking a bath, this Hamlet couples a restless mind with an impulsive physicality and the intimation — during the players’ scene — that Mr. Scott’s prince would have made a good critic.

Ceaselessly alive to a text that can be hard to rid of encrusted tradition, especially in Britain, Mr. Scott brings a blessed conversational quality to a four-hour evening (two intermissions) whose longueurs are offset by the questing intelligence of the whole. Doleful, quick-tempered and irrevocably scarred by a family he has come to loathe, he is a Hamlet in mourning — like someone out of Chekhov — for his own life, when the only real solution to his condition is, inevitably, death.