Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a misunderstood masterpiece; Guardian, 9/18/16

Michael Billington, Guardian; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a misunderstood masterpiece:

"Albee’s protective attitude to his play stemmed in part, I suspect, from the fact that it is widely misunderstood. The searing Mike Nichols 1966 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, stamped it in the public mind as a liquor-fuelled marital slugfest. But the play, I am convinced, is as much about the state of the Union as about marriage. Albee was a deeply political writer who once told me he liked plays to be “useful, not merely decorative”. It is also significant that he wrote the play in the early 1960s when America was slowly emerging from the narcoleptic Eisenhower years and when a fragile Cold War peace depended on the balance of terror...

Rumour has it that Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill are to star in a new London production. With America currently engaged in its own form of post-truth politics, now seems the perfect time to revive Albee’s enduring masterpiece about the danger of living in a world of illusions."