Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? review – carnage in New Carthage as couples fight, flirt, booze and bruise

Curve theatre, Leicester
Cathy Tyson and Patrick Robinson dazzle in this knockout production of Edward Albee’s verbally violent play, full of misogynistic one-liners and tarnished souls

Edward Albee’s 1962 drama of two academic couples boozing and bruising for four hours before dawn rings with boxing imagery. Young Nick from the biology department was a college middleweight champion. One of the (possibly unreliable) anecdotes with which underachieving history don George and wife, Martha, entertain their guests involves the couple once almost slugging it out during bouts run by her college president father. Only Nick’s wife, Honey, is temperamentally noncombative.

This pugilism is fitting because Albee’s vast, verbally violent play dates from the period in the middle third of the 20th century when American dramatists – Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Tennessee Williams and Albee – put their characters through 15 heavyweight rounds until bloodstained submission. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought a brutal bout dubbed the Thrilla in Manila; George and Martha contest the Carnage in New Carthage, Albee’s fictional east coast college town.