Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of the most famous and most frequently performed plays of the 20th century. When it first appeared on Broadway in 1962, it upset critics with its brutal language for the time and its harsh vivisection of a marital relationship, but it delighted audiences, filling 664 performances. Similarly, the famous, still admired 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton changed the standards of what was acceptable in Hollywood.
The play, which provocatively plays on the children's poem "Who's Afraid of the Bad Wolf" in its title, is set in a university, supposedly genteel intellectual environment, which soon reveals its many problematic and cruel aspects. Two married couples of professors (women are still mostly wives at this time) meet on a long drunken night, the younger one just entering this world, while the middle-aged Martha and Georg are already thoroughly steeped in the demands and conundrums of academia, as well as in juggling, concealing and exposing their complicated relationship. A social evening with their professional colleagues turns into a raging Walpurgis night, with everything at stake: professional ambitions and the dirty ways of achieving them, the importance of money and suspicious sources of wealth, the fear of failure and the fierceness of disappointment in the face of it, the pain of unrealized desires and plans and the aggressive hostility that bubbles up from it, but also the tempting irritation of bold statements and gestures, the delightful wit and the fierce, erotic attraction of a woman who seems to be ready for anything. All this is woven into the interplay of their relationships, which are, above all, personal. The focus is on the life of a couple, two couples, who are enacting the story of a woman and a man caught in an irresolvable cycle of hatred and love. And everything is set in an ambivalent interplay of truth and illusion, where self-deception reigns supreme alongside lies and deceit. Even more than the demand for success, this tangle is driven by the myth of personal fulfillment with a child; at this point, the fatality of illusion and the need for the truth of love is finally revealed.
When it was written, Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a fundamental influence on theatre and film, as well as on the understanding of the world of its time. But it has not aged with time; its central themes - the demand for success, the myth of the happy family with children, the interplay of illusion and truth - are more alive today than ever. Moreover, the brilliantly written drama, in which the story of a marital relationship unfolds like a thriller through great twists and turns, offers the possibility of fierce acting creations.
- Diana Koloini