Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Jan 23 to Feb. 23, 2016

Review by Graham Hicks, HicksBiz.com

Written in 1962, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf sits in that pantheon of dysfunctional family dramas that poured out of American playwrights with the release of literary social taboos following World War II – Death of A Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (and the rest of the Tennessee Williams canon), Dark At The Top of the Stairs, Long Day’s Journey into Night.

With one huge exception:  It’s very, very funny and playwright Edward Albee’s wicked humour seems to work even better as time goes by, given the acceptance and prevalence of cheerful cynicism in the early 21^st Century.

Face it, the rest of those classic psycho-dramas were awfully heavy slogging – the long wrung-out pauses, the gloom, the sourness, the non-stop drama, the deep dourness of all those screwed-up people.

Martha and George and Nick and Honey are as screwed up as the rest of those characters in the neighbourhood … but they sure have a lot of fun within the screwed-up-ness!

I did not leave this Citadel production numb or full of angst. I laughed and chuckled for the rest of the evening at the razer-sharp volleys between Martha and George, at the physical humour of Honey, at the descent of Nick from golden-haired hero to shameless social climber.

It helps that this is one of the best-cast shows ever to tread on a Citadel stage, and that standard is exceedingly high to begin with.  Tom Rooney and Brenda Robins are absolutely brilliant as the acerbic, long-married Martha and George, so genuine, so caustic and so actually (sort of? Kind of? Weirdly?) in love.  One is left with the impression that director James MacDonald simply ducked under the liquor table, elbows to ears, to keep out of the fabulous line of fire – not to mention chemistry – happening between these two.

The essence of Albee’s play is the release of every internal negative thought that a married couple might have for one another – the ceaseless internal criticisms that, for the most party, are kept safely locked inside the mind, only to come out in moments of extreme anger, followed by excessive apology and self-recrimination in the aftermath.

Albee’s Martha and George let each other know exactly what they think of one another, and it ain’t pretty.

But, with Albee’s brilliant, incisive thesaurus of insults and put-downs, it is uproarious. The non-stop mind games are also, for the audience, intellectually stimulating. Who can forget the labels George pins on his devious mind-game manipulations of the gullible (or not so gullible) young Nick and Honey: Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess and Humiliate the Host.  

Brenda Robins either has the best-trained voice in Canadian theatre, or she simply has a bullhorn lodged in her throat.  Her sheer volume is gorgeous, but somehow does not overwhelm her cast-mates or the show itself. And within the volume, every word is so clear, nothing is lost.

Let us hope Tom Rooney becomes a regular on the Citadel Stage – he’s not been here since Who Has Seen the Wind in 2002. You could not ask for a better George, so meek, mild and pipe-smoking professor on the exterior, so gleefully bitter, cynical and disillusioned on the inside – which, of course, is what Albee verbally sprays all over the stage.

The three hours of this show pass in a twinkling, because it is so many things - the richness emotional range within its characters, a tragedy, a comedy, that craziest party of your life, a commentary on lives without faith or hope, on sensuality or the lack thereof, and a concluding scene that’s arguably one of the most profound in the history of English-speaking theatre.

Director MacDonald may have let Rooney and Robins loose because both are such seasoned actors who relished these juicy, juicy roles and had such great chemistry.  But his subtle direction is all over the show, particularly in its complex tempos, ebbs and flows.

With Bob Baker’s decision to retire after 17 glorious seasons at the artistic helm of the theatre, the veteran artistic associate MacDonald more than deserves a shot at the top job. He would represent a splendid evolution, as opposed to the revolution that “outsiders” – the pre-Baker succession of artistic directors who thought they had all the answers, with no respect and understanding of the uniqueness of Edmonton’s sophisticated yet unpretentious theatre-going public.

If you are part of that audience, do not miss this show. It is the Citadel Theatre at its best.