![]() "I was blown away by this production with its superb cast.an exhilarating performance" - Richard Connema, Talkin' Broadway "dire and hilarious" - Svea Vikander and Zu Edwards, Theatrius "a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds barred battle of wits" - George Heymont, My Cultural Landscape nicely nuanced performances" - Sally Hogarty, East Bay Times "Jackson hasn’t come up with a concept so much as an assault not an interpretation but a demand: that the play, the actors, the direction, the design, and the audience come together and perform a collective act of creation." - John Wilkins, KQED "What better way to conclude an anniversary season than with a party that just won’t end?" - Sam Hurwitt, The Mercury News "explosive, exciting, and fully engrossing" - Eddie Reynolds, Theatre Eddys "a sizzling approach to a scathing drama" - Leo Stutzin, The Huffington Post the biting script and the involved actors are fully engaging, making every minute rewarding." - Victor Cordell, For All Events Shotgun Players has done a brilliant job." - Emily S. "This performance succeeds beyond expectations. Shotgun shows that Albee’s ideas are very much alive - potently, unnervingly so." - Lilly Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle "One of American theater’s most fascinating couples. Even so, he points out, they have not lost their power.Tickets | Cast and Crew | Playwright | Photos | Backstage | Press ![]() I go:īy now, Hill is so familiar with the lines that they are etched into his subconscious. “I will have a random thought and then I will find myself repeating that thought as if that were a line. “It’s very hard to turn them off,” he says. The repetition of lines eventually seeped into the rest of his life. It’s the busiest part I’ve ever played in my life, in terms of lines, speeches, even the length of the play itself.” His solution was entirely logical. ![]() So what did he find challenging? “Learning the bloody lines to be honest. Or you wouldn’t play anything that anyone has played before.” “No, no, if you think like that you would never leave the house. Hill, however, is more pragmatic than that. Plenty of actors would balk in the face of script that is so complex, especially when it was famously performed by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. It is this steadfast emphasis on craft that colours his approach to Virginia Woolf. Before that, however, he carved out a distinguished career on the stage, winning an Olivier Award in 2001 for Stones in their Pockets, a grim, gusty play that follows a Hollywood film crew as they descend upon the bucolic Kerry countryside, and required Hill to move, in a deft display of virtuosity, through an enormous array of characters. Hailing from Northern Ireland, Hill is best-known as Lord Varys, scheming eunuch and and spymaster to the King of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones. Set on a university campus, George and Martha-pointedly named after the Washingtons-entertain a younger couple, hosting a polite dinner that transitions into drink-sodden evening of savage humiliation, animated by a sharp, barbed dialogue. “Just when President Trump’s spokesperson has talked about alternate facts.” “Regarding truth and illusion: it’s a very interesting time,” he says. In fact, a revival could not have been more timely. For Conleth Hill, who stars in the West End’s latest production of the play alongside Imelda Staunton, its themes chime neatly with the current zeitgeist. A study in deception and frustration and hatred and impotence, its characters are trapped in their own illusory worlds. Today, the play is firmly established as a classic. It was 1963, and the play’s depiction of a disintegrating academic marriage was deemed too downbeat abrasively candid, it failed to portray a suitably wholesome, American way of life.Īlbee’s rejection of respectability might have incensed the jurors, but it set him in good stead. Edward Albee, American playwright and master of the bleak, black domestic drama, would have won four Pulitzers, matching the record set by Eugene O’Neill, had the judges not decided that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his searing epic of marital discord, was too vulgar.
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