Crucible, Sheffield
Clearly not director Erica Whyman. She growls with real conviction at Edward Albee's great bloody beast of a play set on a New England college campus in the early 60s, where the late-night drinking games of two faculty couples reveal uncomfortable truths about their strained marriages. This isn't so much Mad Men as deranged husbands and wives, driven crazy by their own yearning disappointment, uncertainty and misplaced ambition.
Soutra Gilmour's design offers ceiling-high bookshelves that have run out of books, just as surely as failed academic George, married to the college president's drunken daughter, Martha, has run out of ideas as his energies have been consumed by the fictions of his marriage and a gift for psychological sadism.
Whyman's production cannily suggests that the catastrophe of George and Martha and campus newcomers Nick and Honey, who unwisely accept an invitation for a late-night drink, is a very American tragedy set on the cusp of a fast-changing world. It's a play that demands no-holds performances, and it gets them here.
Sian Thomas as the ravenous Martha and Jasper Britton as the quietly wounding George are both superb; she is all coltish legs and sharp-angled discontent; he has the deceptive aura of an old teddy bear, but one with razor blades secreted within the spilled stuffing.
John Hopkins suggests that Nick is undone by vaulting ambition, and as the neurotic girl-woman, Honey, Lorna Beckett has an Olive Oyl cartoon quality. It's not comfortable viewing, but it's not supposed to be. It is viciously and often garishly funny. Not a nice night out, but a frighteningly potent one.