WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Sydney Theatre Company, Red Stitch, GWB Entertainment & Andrew Henry Presents at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, 7 November-14 December 2025. Photography by Prudence Upton
The hope of seeing something like this production is what makes people keep coming to the theatre. Edward Albee’s 63-year-old Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed with elan and intelligence by Sarah Goodes, is superb. On Monday – catching up – evening, it held the audience in thrall for three and a half explosive hours, then sent us out into the night, dazed and marvelling.
This Virginia Woolf started out at Red Stitch in Melbourne in 2023, playing to 60 seats. It moved on to the 1000-seat Comedy Theatre in 2024. And now to Sydney and STC’s 896-seat Ros. Not that the size difference shows. It opens with middle-aged academic George (David Whiteley) and wife Martha (Kat Stewart), stumbling home from a faculty party in the early hours, via the auditorium’s side door and stairs.
The usually cavernous stage is draped right around with the kind of filmy frou-frou that used to be seen in 1950s bathrooms (set designer Harriet Oxley). It creates a much more intimate space of the living room, where Martha and George drink and wrangle. And this time, at two in the morning, prepare to entertain, for a nightcap, newly-hired academic Nick (Harvey Zielinski) and his wife Honey (Emily Goddard).
Martha is a belligerent, punchy drunk, while George’s passive aggression is smooth and deadly as a stiletto. After 20+ years of marriage, it soon becomes obvious that each needs more and more toxic barbs and lethal indifference in their battle for supremacy. At the same time, they have weaponised the act of not listening until that too can draw blood – figuratively speaking.
When Nick and Honey arrive to be plied with bourbon or brandy, they’re not so much lambs to the slaughter as rabbits frozen in the headlights. As is the audience. Right from the start, Stewart’s rage is volcanic with barely suppressed energy. She is mesmerising, even when not on stage. (As George entertains/goads Nick, her cackling laughter from the kitchen is ungodly.) The contrast with Whiteley’s suavely infuriating likeability is dynamic, and piquant too, as they are married in real life. How do they manage this nightly fraying tightrope? As Laurence Olivier once told Dustin Hoffman: acting, dear boy, acting.
Acting too from Goddard, whose naive, prone-to-nervous-vomiting wife is not only an ancestor of the Stepford Wives but also an accomplished comic whose grasp of the play’s humour is firm. Her interpretive dance is a highlight of an evening of highlights.
As the apparently decent, yet sneakily ambitious younger husband, Zielinski has the least interesting role and is, literally at times, the putz off whom the others bounce. That the quartet works so well is a mark of his shrewd generosity and the sheer excellence of the production as a whole.
In her program notes, Sarah Goodes writes of the three keys to her approach to the play: “ritual, rage and middle age.” Each element is intertwined and inescapable, yet she could have added “laughter”. It’s the sprinkled seasoning that makes Albee’s extremes of human behaviour and relationships not only bearable but recognisable. Also recognisable and not downplayed is the unconscious misogyny of the 1950s. For all she’s a hellion, Martha is actually hopelessly fragile, while Honey is a lolloping ditz but more likely to survive and thrive.
The living room, lit by Matt Scott, is quietly dominated by a wet bar that looks more like a shrine or an altar, and is a perfect symbol of George and Martha’s life. Alcohol is central to the action. It’s a coin toss as to whether it’s the oil or sand in the meshing of their lives. Either way, the mix of laughter and horrified disbelief – or identification – is irresistible.
Composition and sound design by Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter are equally beguiling as fragments of music signal the era, while more abstract effects foreshadow the ominous cracking of a heart, or courage, amid the mind games that are so much a part of George and Martha’s lives.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an epic for four, and brilliantly wrought by Sarah Goodes and her cast. When a bird sings as dawn breaks, it’s the promise, perhaps, of redemption, and it’s that human possibility that sets it apart. Recommended without reservation.
