When a new West End production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s 1962 modern classic behemoth of a marital slugfest, was announced earlier this year, Gillian Anderson was quoted as saying that the role of Martha was one she had wanted to play “for decades”. Her patient wait for this juiciest of parts for a middle-aged actress has more than paid off, for she is wonderful in the ferocious/fragile role for which Elizabeth Taylor won her second Oscar.
Whether or not star Billy Crudup had been counting the years until he could get stuck into the personal and professional disappointments of Martha’s mid-ranking academic husband George is unknown, but the thrilling revelation is that Crudup is sensationally good as a man who looks as if he has had all the air let out of his tyres. I have been underwhelmed by Crudup’s previous two West End outings, not least the hugely disappointing earlier this year, but if he doesn’t scoop next year’s Olivier Award for Best Actor, I will be astonished.
When they were working together on the now-tarnished 2024 film , Anderson revealed her interest in this play to director Marianne Elliot, a woman who selects her quality projects with the greatest of care. Their inspired choice was to pick Soho Place, the West End’s newest theatre, as their venue, since Soho Place’s in-the-round auditorium offers a thrilling level of intimacy to this most brutal of domestic dramas.
So close are we to the action that we too feel like guests at the ill-advised 2am after-party drinks at George and Martha’s, in addition to the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed newlyweds Nick and Honey (Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn, both wonderful). The former is a youthful new colleague of George’s at the small New England college of which Martha’s father is the all-powerful president.
As the drinks flow like a river in torrent, George and Martha’s lacerating marital truth-telling unfolds with the ingenious tactics of a professional wrestling match in this perfect setting. Martha is bright, eloquent and educated, but this being the early 1960s, her life is doomed to be lived out via her husband’s achievements. Or lack thereof in George’s case; the original plan for him to be groomed as his father-in-law’s successor has long since been abandoned. Instead, this desperately unhappy pair have been left to torture each other with toxic alcohol-sodden late-night “games”.
The brilliance of Anderson’s and Crudup’s performances is that they both hum with sexuality, hers overtly and his more subtly. There are moments in George and Martha’s fighting when it seems as though they may stop wounding each other with ever-more-carefully-crafted spears made out of words and instead engage in some passionate lovemaking. But no, they teeter on the brink and then draw back, ever more full of longing and loathing, both for themselves and each other.
If Crudup has a slumped and defeated quality, Anderson is all beautifully dressed glamour, with figure-hugging clothes and immaculate red nails shaped to a fearsome point like 10 tiny weapons of mass destruction (Horn’s Honey, in contrast, wears a sweet yellow dress and matching Alice band, the picture of wholesome innocence).
A wooden shelf surrounds the circular living room set, which revolves gradually, and Martha prowls around it on hands and knees like a wild beast preparing for the kill. Yet at the climactic moment of these three deliciously exhausting hours, she stands with a look of raw and unadulterated pain in her wide eyes. For George is also a beast on the hunt and Crudup’s impeccable timing has him pounce and withdraw continually without moving so much as a muscle.
This is one of the big-news shows of 2026, a production I bet will eventually make it over to Broadway.
‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ is at @sohoplace, London, to 19 December (sohoplace.org )