Hong Kong Players to present modern classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Local theatre troupe stages Edward Albee’s brilliant award-winning play about a tempestuous night of mind games, drink and cruelty among American academics
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which opens on February 17 at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, was the play that made playwright Edward Albee’s reputation.
First produced on Broadway in 1962, it picked up both the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play the following year, and narrowly missed winning Albee his first Pulitzer Prize.
Now 87, and generally recognised as a grand old man of American letters, Albee has since picked up three Pulitzers, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a classic of modern drama.
The play is an unsettling work, with strong language for the era, and it isn’t difficult to imagine why, after the Pulitzer’s Drama Jury had selected it, the more conservatively minded advisory committee decided to veto the award.
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Divided into three separately titled acts – Fun and Games, Walpurgisnacht, and The Exorcism – the play takes place over the course of a nightmarish evening when a young university professor and his wife’s accept an invitation for drinks from the wife of an older professor at the college.