Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf w/ Imelda Staunton

I don't think it opened in time for her to be eligible this year. 

We sat in C1 and C2. The view was absolutely fine, fantastic value for £10. You only miss a tiny bit when the actors are on the far right side of the stage, but that happens only a couple of times when they are going upstairs and it only lasts a few seconds. 99% of the action takes place centre stage. Enjoy!

Loved the 2 principals, particularly Conleth Hill, who is a marvel!

Some spoilers follow. . .

If Imelda Staunton was concerned about being compared to Elizabeth Taylor in the movie, she has nothing to worry about. As good as Taylor was, she was about twenty years too young for Martha, which skews the character away from carrying the weight of a whole lifetime of disappointment: which is what Staunton successfully conveys. Besides which, the movie is far too nasty to be relatable, with Richard Burton's George so unrelentingly cold and cruel, I can barely bear to watch the thing.

By contrast, both Staunton and Hill find ways of being incredibly nasty to each other, while simultaneously carrying the audience's empathy for their characters, all the way to the bitter yet heartbreaking end.

As in the movie, Staunton plays Martha as a battleaxe, (something the softer Kathleen Turner refrained from doing), which gives her performance the bite you want from this play, but she brilliantly utilises a baby voice strategically, in different tones at different times, sometimes to mock, but sometimes to hold her inner child out to George for his embrace. This prevents her performance from descending into caricature.

Hill, as George, displays a stand-up's mastery in manipulating the audience, which he combines with an actor's mastery at emotionally reacting. He knows just how to balance the silent suffering of his character with the softly spoken vitriol. A cruel line that in another actor's mouth would elicit disapproval and groans from the audience, in his mouth receives roars of approval and laughter. This is because he subtly builds enormous empathy for his George, gracefully absorbing humiliation and hurt from moment to moment, preparing his slingshot filled with barbs so perfectly that when his cruel retort comes, it is as much the perfect psychic relief for the audience as it is for George. His George is intrinsically nastier than Bill Irwin's, yet for me, equally sympathetic, which is a perfect balance.

Where the production suffers in comparison to the film is in it's depiction of the minor characters, the two guests: young couple, Nick and Honey. There is a richness to the film, where the motivations and behaviours of the hosts and guests mirror and refract and magnify upon each other. In the film, George Segal's Nick is as much a predatory shark as Richard Burton's George, he's just not as good at it. In the film, Sandy Dennis' Honey has the same deep desires as Elizabeth Taylor's Martha, she just can't hide it so well. Indeed, in the film, Sandy Dennis gives one of the all-time great screen performances of an empathetic emotional human sponge, instantly internalising and reflecting the pains of others.

All this richness is gone in this production (some remained intact in the Turner Production), where Luke Treadaway's Nick is a mere lunk, attractive with it and sporting an Elvis accent, and Imogen Poots' Honey is a mere mouse, albeit a very mousy mouse well-realised. This is not down to the actors, but the director, who has focused his eye on the main duo, and must feel that increasing the complexity of the storyline by adding nuances to the supporting players' reactions would only confuse matters.

James Macdonald also directed the earlier Albee production at the Almeida that Parsley rightly praised, "A Delicate Balance," which had another great performance by Staunton as an alcoholic, so he plainly knows what he's doing, and has deliberately chosen to give us a show that places Hill and Staunton at the centre, and includes the others as clapping seals to keep our focus where he wants it, on Hill and Staunton.

Ultimately, I loved this production as much as I loved the Turner one, and more than the film. But across all three versions I've now seen, the two performances that I most love are Sandy Dennis as Honey in the movie and Conleth Hill as George, at the Harold Pinter.

4 stars (and could get better)!

So, is the audience refraining from eating in their seats as requested by the producers? www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39126467

The original casting they intended for the film was James Mason and Bette Davis.

We were in row E of the Dress as well & was frequently distracted by the front of house staff clomping around out there, not sure if they realise how much they can be heard in the auditorium!

People can still rustle and chomp on bags of sweets bought in the bar though.

Good to hear! I'm in those seats in a few weeks.

I've put a couple of tickets for this next week in the noticeboard section, they're free as I don't want them to go to waste if anyone's interested...

Burly Bear and dan213 don't believe you. At the performances they attend, Everyone Leaps Up! Including you.

On the train to catch this afternoons performance right now. After Sweeney Todd and Gypsy I try and make a point of seeing everything Imelda Staunton is in as I find the woman an incredible stage presence who never fails to completely blow me away. Really looking forward to another knockout performance but quite shocked looking through this thread and reading some of the less than stellar reviews. Guess I'll see for myself...

I don't believe this production "played for laughs" - the laughs are there. I think it's wittiest play ever written by an American. The movie was not funny and perhaps that confuses things. Richard Burton's cold dour George was a great performance but he didn't do funny and neither did Elizabeth Taylor. In this production we have two leading actors with impeccable comic timing and they bounce insults off each other like a veteran vaudeville team, which, in a sense, they are. They've been playing these "games" for quite a while now and they have the routine polished to perfection. The difference on this night is that Martha has broken the rules - she has mentioned their son - and thus all bets are off. Verbal jousting has turned into armed combat.

I thought this was an absolutely brilliant production, surpassing the Kathleen Turner/Bill Irwin show because Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill take the play to places the two American actors could not reach. Staunton, especially, is far more effective than Turner. I think her size is a major plus for her. She seems like a little bundle of rage careening around the stage, lacerating and vulgar and hilarious and yet deeply wounded and showing it, even at her worst. She hates George because he dared to love her, her self-loathing is that intense. Was there ever a sadder character.

And Conleth Hill's George is a sublime match for her, a counter-puncher, taking the hits and always coming back. His pain too is on show but he has a sly diffidence that seems to shrug it off even when we know the blows are hitting home. These are people for whom alcohol fuelled fighting is a ritual, an outlet vital to their survival. Because the truth of their lives together is even worse and cannot be faced.

The sheer power of the two leading performances tended to reduce the other couple at the "party" even more than usual - see Steve's astute comments in his review, above, for a good analysis of this. I liked Imogen Poots's Honey, she was something different in the role and entirely credible to me. Mireille Enos in the Turner/Irwin production was excellent but she looked and sounded so much like Sandy Dennis that she seemed never to escape Ms Dennis's shadow - not so here.

I had more of an issue with Luke Treadaway's Nick who was truthful and fine but seemed too young, lacking both the man-on-the-make quality of George Segal in the movie and the size and looming presence of David Harbour in the Turner/Irwin show. This Nick never seemed to be the threat that George perceives him to be.

James Macdonald's direction was, I thought, perfect. Even at 3 hours and 10 minutes it was fast-paced, never losing its momentum, never bogging down in the set pieces.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We know the answer. And when Imelda Staunton utters it in the last line of the play it is devastating. And we know we have been on a journey like no other in the theatre.