Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✩✩
by Edward Albee, directed by William Carden
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
May 29-November 2, 2001
"A ‘Woolf’ That Doesn’t Frighten"
Whoever thought to have Noel Coward's "Private Lives" and Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" play on the Avon stage in the same season made a very clever decision. Both plays involve two couples who bicker and tear strips off each other. Both involve violence and swapping of partners. But while the threats in Coward play are never serious, they are in Albee as George and Martha and their two unsuspecting guests Nick and Honey are forced through a dark night of the soul to see the illusions that have guided their lives vanish with the dawn.
American director William Carden has given the Stratford Festival a mediocre production redeemed by some great performances. Frequent theatre-goers will know that only three years ago Ontario saw a much finer production directed by Michael Shamata at the Grand Theatre in London. Both productions starred Peter Donaldson as George. That Donaldson was so much more effective in London underscores for me how much more incisive Shamata's direction was than Carden's.
Carden's production pulls its punches. This may make it easier on the audience, but it is unfair to the play and the actors. He makes Act 1 of "Virginia Woolf" into such an all-out laugh riot one would never know the play had any depth . As a result, Act 2 suffers since he has taught the audience to laugh a things which said in a different intonation would not be funny at all. Only in Act 3 does he decides to get serious, but since he has not allowed the actors to give the multilayered performances they could have done, the act seems totally unrelated to the rest of the play. The personality of the character Martha, for instance, seems miraculously to shift during the interval from brazen to reflective.
Shamata's production was so strong because he captured the real menace that lies so near the surface in the remarks of George, Martha and Nick. He allowed the variety in line delivery necessary to bring out the multiple layers of the text and the characters. This approach led to a steady increase of tension right up to the requiem at the very end. Carden does none of this. He is content to have Acts 1 and 2 played pretty much like a sitcom with the flattening of characters that implies. Act 3 is very well done, but lacks the richness and inevitability better preparation would have provided.
Carden is abetted in his superficial approach by the design. American designer Ray Recht has given us a typical Broadway set, a room filling the stage opening and crammed with detail to the point of fussiness. The trouble with such ultra-realism is that it has no interpretive function and thus could just as well suit Neil Simon as this particular play by Albee. In contrast, John Fergusson for Shamata provided a unit set on either side of which the back of the stage was visible. This immediately suggested the the void that surrounds the action and of which all of the characters are afraid. Before each act it was rotated slightly to show how Albee re-views the relations of the four characters. Needless to say, a set like Recht's does none of this.
As is the Broadway habit, the set is overlit. Stifling Michael J. Whitfield's creativity, Carden asks for light levels so high the set looks like a bar with its cleaning lights on rather than anything connected to the nominal light sources on stage. This means that the break of dawn, so crucial to the play's symbolism, does not register. The one element of the design that does work are the costumes of Amela Baksic. She at least has taken her cue from the text with the black kimono she give Martha which helps link an image of her in the past with the present.
Given the narrow parameters Carden has given them, all four actors give fine to excellent performances. Carden knows from the text that Martha is "loud and vulgar". Therefore he has Martha Henry play Martha so big from the beginning that there is nowhere for her to go. This continues through the first two acts with diminishing returns. We really should not have to worry if her voice will give out. Where Shamata allowed Brenda Robins to show moments of fragility quite naturally from the start, Henry has to wait until Act 3 to show another side to her character. Subtlety and nuance are what we are used to from Henry and she uses the loosening of Carden's straightjacket to redeem the rest of the play with a stunning performance.
The same can be said of Peter Donaldson (George). Throughout Acts 1 and 2, Carden has Donaldson say virtually all his lines in the same deadpan manner because the contrast with the overloud Martha always gets a laugh. Released from these strictures in Act 3, Donaldson is finally allowed to characterize his part more fully, just as he did over all three acts for Shamata. Finally, we see that the plan to destroy Martha's illusions that Carden has George conceive in spite in Act 2 may really have been conceived in love.
Sean Arbuckle (Nick) is much better here than he was as Orsino in "Twelfth Night". As a guest, much of Nick's personality and allegiances are expressed in subtext. Since Carden is uninterested in subtext and since Nick is mostly passive in Act 3, Arbuckle never gets the chance to make him a forceful or clearly defined character. The surprise of the evening for me was the excellent performance of Claire Jullien (Honey). Honey seems like a simp but in fact is far more aware of things than she lets on. Jullien is fully alive to this and gives us glimpses of her awareness through the drunken stupor Honey uses as a cover.
It is regrettable that Shamata's finer production of this play for the Grand Theatre will have had less exposure than Carden's production for Stratford. Like "Long Day's Journey into Night", "Virginia Woolf" is seldom produced because of the great demands it makes on the actors and the audience. Carden has decided to reduce those demands by trivializing the play's first two acts. Still, he does finally rise to the occasion in the third act. For the sake of that third act and the performances that are at last allowed to bloom in it, I would recommend this production to anyone who has never seen the play on stage. At least that act gives a glimpse of how magnificent the whole work might have been in other hands.
Photo: Martha Henry and Peter Donaldson. ©2001 V. Tony Hauser.
2001-06-05
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?