Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★★★

Written by Edward Albee. GWB Entertainment & Andrew Henry Presents the Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre production. Sydney Theatre Company. Roslyn Packer Theatre. 7 Nov – 14 Dec, 2025.

It’s back — the most caustic of all domestic comedies. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf returns to Sydney with its jagged wit and diabolically broken relationships, brought to the stage by real-life married couple Kat Stewart and David Whiteley.

George (Whiteley) and Martha (Stewart) return home from a faculty party filled with minor complaints. You were too loud. You were too quiet. You weren’t funny. They settle into their tired, drunken bickering routine as George makes Martha a nightcap. But it won’t be a nightcap. Martha has invited a nice young couple they met – Nick (Harvey Zielinski) and Honey (Emily Goddard) – over to keep the party going. Why? Does she just want to humiliate George further? Or is there something more to the games they’re both playing?

I’ll lay my cards on the table early and say that I think Albee’s script is near perfect. It’s a finely tuned machine of subtext, competing motivations, and carefully dropped hints. Yes, the three-hour-plus running time is intimidating. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a single line you’d want to cut. The emotional fever builds carefully over the course of the play, and it would break the rhythm to tinker with Albee’s work. More than sixty years on, it remains a modern masterpiece.

If Albee’s text is a masterclass in structure, his characters are a study in complex, competing motivations and emotional drives. George and Martha are the culmination of decades of slights, frustrations, and dead dreams – middle-aged people who feel too much and can only numb themselves with liquor.

Their world is a sick microcosm of insular jokes and stories only they truly understand. Like an online conspiracy theorist cut off from regular society, they’re losing touch with the real world and retreating into their dysfunctional private hell. You know they’ve had this exact fight before, yet there’s some strange comfort in the repetition – they understand one another completely and that is its own sort of intimacy. It’s only when George changes the game that the true horror settles in.

Kat Stewart is invigorating as the academic’s housewife clawing at the walls of her middle-class existence. She brings a feline grace and simmering rage to Martha as she stalks the stage – the world is ignoring her but she is demanding its attention.

While Stewart has rightly been highly praised, I found myself drawn more to Whiteley’s viciously professorial and quick-witted performance. His George is an example of masterfully pitched tone. There’s a menace to his delivery – a sense that George is playing multiple games at once – but that cerebral element never outweighs the emotional drive, the pain, that pushes him forward. Watching these two together is the stuff theatrical dreams are made of. This is gold.

As the younger academic couple, Nick and Honey, Zielinski and Goddard at first seem miscast – neither fitting the physical descriptions given in the script. But their performances quickly dispel any doubts, especially Goddard, who has the hardest role to balance as a more traditionally comedic figure. Under Sarah Goodes’ direction, she lands her moments without breaking the tone.

All of this comes together under Goodes’ steady hand. She has doubled down on the emotional horror of the story, adding short, ethereal interludes that strengthen the ongoing mystery surrounding George and Martha’s “kid”. As the audience is left to guess how much of what they’re saying is truth and how much is bitter fiction, these moments tease us further.

Harriet Oxley’s design is both spacious and stifling, placing George and Martha’s bar centre stage – there’s no forgetting their lives revolve around alcohol. There are beautiful subtleties in Matt Scott’s lighting and in Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter’s sound design (even if one cue felt slightly overused).

This production has grown from Melbourne’s 80-seat Red Stitch Actors Theatre, where it debuted in 2023, to the expanded, full-scale version we see today. These actors have had time to settle into their roles and live with these complex characters – and it shows. The production has already received near-universal acclaim, and it’s clear to see why. Unlike the 2022 production staged at the Sydney Opera House (which I missed, but multiple sources say was a bit of a drag), this version rises to the challenge of the text.

Make no mistake: this is a heavy night at the theatre. As funny as it is watching two people tear each other apart with wit and venom, it’s also a journey into alcoholism and emotional abuse – and, strangely, at the end of the day, a twisted love story. At three hours twenty minutes, including two short intervals (you’ll be racing to either use the loo or get to the bar – good luck doing both), it makes for an intense evening, especially on a school night. But, for my money, it doesn’t get much better than this.