THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Edward Albee
@sohoplace theatre, 4 Soho Place, Charing Cross Road, W1D 3BG until December 19, 2026
With two great American stars at the top of their game, Marianne Elliott directing, and a rare in the round staging, this promised to be one of the highlights of the theater season. And it is.
Albee’s timeless classic is praised for how it illuminates a toxic marriage but it’s actually more about co-dependency. “YOU can stand it; you married me for it” bellows Martha to her husband George at a crucial moment near the end. They will survive. It’s the folk who get in their way we need to feel sympathy for.
By setting it in the round and on an almost imperceptible revolve (which aids the woozy drunkenness of the piece), Elliott pits us into a gladiatorial arena, albeit one with a beautiful Eames armchair and an elegant drinks trolley. Miriam Beuther’s period perfect set combines intimacy and scale. We’re right in the eye of the storm here, which puts even more pressure on this superb quartet of actors.
It’s 2am and we’re in a New England college town in the early 1960s. George (Billy Crudup), a history professor, and his wife Martha (Gillian Anderson) trundle back from a faculty party. Her father is the college President. Martha announces they have guests arriving for a nightcap. In come the twentysomething couple, Nick (Josh Dylan) and Honey (Phoebe Horn), Nick being a fellow academic new to the college. The booze starts flowing, the fun and games commence, and tongues are gradually loosened.
Gillian Anderson (following Imelda Staunton, Kathleen Turner, and Diana Rigg in this role in the West End) brings fresh layers to Martha. Elegant rather than blousy (in Beuther’s perfectly judged costumes), she has a sexy earthiness, and you understand fully how her Daddy would have benefited from her hostess duties at all those dull Trustee dinners for the college. The tragedy of Martha is thwarted ambition, trapped as a faculty wife, and being stuck with a husband she’d hoped would go places. For George, precisely not going to those places is mostly blamed on Daddy, a perfect recipe for curdling resentment.
Crudup too is astonishing, bringing to George that evil charm he deployed to such effect on The Morning Show. With his graying locks, gray clothes, and a disheveled and wearied demeanor, he embodies dead-eyed middle age. Martha might dismiss him as a ‘flop’ but in Crudup’s hands we gradually realize it’s George who is really pulling the strings here. It’s a wonderfully nuanced interpretation. George’s main weapon is his professorial erudition which he deploys with a surgeon’s skill; the wit could be from Coward at times, but here the sarcasm has been laced with vitriol.
Josh Dylan, a stage newcomer, really looks the part of the blond all-American hero, Nick. He’s not intimidated by George’s passive aggressive games or the accusation of being a gold digger and he more than holds his own. Phoebe Horn shines too as his gormless, sunny blonde wife Honey. Horn gives her a wonderful combination of fragility and inner steeliness which only comes out after a few brandies.
Elliott seems to mine every line of dialogue for its riches, and this great cast then just make it fly. Her pacing of the enveloping drunkenness and hysteria as the night goes on is masterful and it all culminates in a climax of devastating truth-telling.
The boozing is the one element of this 1962 play which has dated. One suspects today that such characters would be swapping gym tips or marathon timings rather than cocktails, and probably going to bed early, more’s the pity.
Its Wagnerian running time of 3 hours 20 minutes requires a commitment from the audience, but it is well rewarded here in a production which just couldn’t be bettered. The play is a modern masterpiece because it is unforgiving in its honesty about us all and how we need our illusions just to get by. If you’ve only seen the Burton-Taylor movie version make sure you catch this.
