I'm no expert on Edward Albee's plays, but they're a little short in the Chekhovian human sympathy department. His women are killers, and his men can be pretty vicious too. I had never had the chance to see or read A Delicate Balance before last night's preview performance at the Almeida, so I came to the play completely fresh. I left reeling from its emotional savagery.
Written in the mid-1960s when the playwright was approaching 40, this is Albee's bleak vision of what happens in middle age. A wife and a husband go through the motions of marital affection, but no longer share a bed or even a bedroom. Drink in the shape of a perfectly mixed martini provides only brief consolation for lives in which all fresh choices seem to have vanished. A wayward daughter returns home after the breakdown of her fourth marriage. A sister drowns in drink. Best friends turn up unexpectedly on the doorstep and move in, claiming to be frightened by some unspecified terror. The action takes place over a weekend, and the three-act structure perfectly fits the material. While the lives remain unresolved, the dramatic crisis between Friday and Sunday has run its course, with the loquacious characters left in silence at the end.
Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, this is a play that works on several levels; in James Macdonald's extremely subtle production, there's a tension between the high naturalism of the set -- a very WASP 1960s family home with art on the walls, leather-bound books and cut-glass whisky tumblers -- and the Pinteresque qualities of the dialogue. Are these articulate people saying what they mean or disguising their real feelings behind a defensive wall of words? One of the delicate balances seems to me to lie in the contrast of realism and non-realism. Macdonald -- responsible for an outstanding revival of James Joyce's Exiles a few years ago at the National Theatre -- is very adept at exploring this kind of contradiction. He also turned Caryl Churchill's rather feeble two-hander Drunk Enough To Say I Love You at the Royal Court into something very special, placing the two characters above the stage on a suspended sofa.
Tim Pigott-Smith and Penelope Wilton play the married couple Tobias and Agnes with great skill, though Wilton may have been miscast. Agnes has ice in her heart, but Wilton is an actress who radiates warmth and humanity on stage. (I had the same feeling when I saw her playing the mother from hell in The House of Bernarda Alba at the National). Lucy Cohu is explosively convincing as their hysterical daughter Julia, and Imelda Staunton carefully avoids the 'playing drunk' stereotype in the role of Agnes's alcoholic sister Claire. Claire describes herself as a drunk rather than an alcoholic, but this is the opposite of the truth. Rather than swaying around unsteadily, Claire is a woman who looks sober enough but is completely enslaved by booze. As the strange neighbours Edna and Harry who arrive like cuckoos in the family nest, Diana Hardcastle and Ian McElhinney are also pitch-perfect , mastering the art of remaining still and enigmatic.
This play may not have quite the power of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf but it's a lot more satisfying than The Goat, which was the last Albee play at the Almeida. That one stopped at the interval just as it was getting interesting, though it transferred to the West End. If there is any justice on Shaftesbury Avenue, I hope this production will also move on and find a wider audience.
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