Those who want to moan about the toxic reliance on celebrity casting and screen stars in the West End can stop right there: Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson both began their careers on stage. Here they are now, glittering up Edward Albee’s conflagration of a play about unhappy marriage and its necessary illusions, immortalised on screen by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Anderson and Crudup can hold their own against that landmark adaptation of the play about George, a middle-aged history professor with a sagging academic libido, and Martha, his frustrated, ceaselessly needling wife. They are confident performers and it makes sense that this 1962 American classic about conjugal warfare is taken on by two Americans, albeit under the aegis of British directorial powerhouse Marianne Elliott. If Elliott’s previous production, Les Liasons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, had what some considered an anaemic connection between its leading lovers, there is no shortage of sparks and sparring for the central couple here. They are shouty and jousting, although it does not feel dangerous or emotionally eviscerating enough between them for rather too long.
