Fear stalks the characters in Edward Albee’s most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; it’s so pervasive, it’s in the title. But what is the source of that fear? Surely not the modernist author, who’d committed suicide two full decades before the play was written? These are highly educated, comfortably middle-class people, so what precisely scares them so much?
For the couple at the centre of the work, fear is something to be endured – just like other by-products of living, such as disappointment, boredom and cynicism. George (David Whiteley) and Martha (Kat Stewart) have lived for decades in the grounds of the university where he works, under the all-seeing eye of her father, the university’s president. Albee establishes in the opening minutes a sense of these two as masters of endurance, even if it’s a poisoned and monstrous mastery, always on the lookout for weakness and fatigue.
