EDWARD Albee’s 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is one of the great 20th century classics of the theatre.

A dark mix of absurdist comedy and stage battles, the stakes are no less than the fate of American civilisation itself, seen in the ironical naming of the two main characters, Martha and George – Mr and Mrs America, Martha and George Washington.

Actor Michael Sparks last played the role of George 12 years ago for Free Rain Theatre, with Andrea Close as his opposite number, and they’re doing it again, this time as part of ACT Hub’s premiere season. 

Second time round, he thinks it’s a lot easier to understand George’s motives and, as well, he and the cast are having an awful lot of fun with the wordplay – “We laugh so much,” he says.

Fuelled by booze, Albee’s characters spar in a series of party games such as “Humiliate the Host” and “Get the Guests”, all brought by George to a searing conclusion in the final act, “the exorcism”.

Some local academics have told me that what goes on in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is like any night on any campus, but I don’t believe it, for the play is really Albee’s commentary on modern life. 

Sparks, who originally hails from Anniston, Alabama, is enjoying revisiting his “big, intimidating role”, but believes the play is now a period piece set in the ’60s in an east coast university town.

“The characters’ mannerisms, their language and their literacy speak of the time and place,” he says. 

Although Martha accuses George of being a failed academic, a mere associate professor and “convoluted”, he is clearly an erudite man whose cultural literacy is so formidable that it sent Sparks to the study to research what he’s talking about.

“I had to figure out what it is that George is focusing on, because he’s a very complicated character,” he says.

“He’s not a full professor and that’s a shameful thing for his wife Martha, who is the daughter of the college president, and she’s constantly at him for not having the kind of personality that would be attractive to donors and people who support the university.”

That sounds very 21st-century.

Martha is no literary intellectual like George, but Sparks sees her as educated and intelligent, but on the very edge of losing it all together – her addiction to alcohol doesn’t help.

Far from creating an average boozy night on campus, Albee conjures up an absurdist nightmare peopled with a phantom child, a phantom murder and a phantom pregnancy, all stage-managed by George, who decides to expose the truth at the end of the play.

Albee said the title of the play “means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf… who’s afraid of living life without false illusions,” even though it seems at first to be just an intellectual joke about the writer Virginia Woolf.

Confirming the impression that this is more than any old boozy party, George reads from a book about the decline and fall of the western world, but Sparks has found that they’re not the words of say, Edward Gibbon, but Albee’s words, an expression of his idea that the west is too burdened and too inflexible to adapt to the future.

The fun and games in the play are not just between George and Martha, of course. There are their guests, Nick the muscular young biology professor, played by Josh Wiseman, and his apparently sweet wife Honey, played by Karina Hudson.

Nick, who has created something for himself out of nothing, is a representative of the American dream, Sparks thinks. 

“He’s like the man of the future, historically inevitable, science versus the humanities.”

But there’s emptiness there, too, as Honey is exposed by George as having been aborting her own children.

One of the big questions is why, when George starts drawing them into the morass of reality, the young couple don’t just leave. Sparks believes that it’s about Nick trying to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself, even if it means having to play the nauseating party game of “hump the hostess”.

This play is ultimately Albee’s great comment on western civilisation, but it’s also an emotional and personal play about two people who love each other.

“Don’t forget, George loves Martha so much that he doesn’t want her to be destroyed,” Sparks says.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, ACT Hub, Kingston, August 31-September 17.

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