14 FEBRUARY 1964, Page 17

The Rules of the Game

Who's Afraid of Virginia

Woolf? (Piccadilly.) CONSIDER a good modern play. A realistic frame- work and recognisable people but nothing too constricting because there must be room for ex- aggeration. Life as we know it confronts life as we fear it. The old device of the pistol which can't be kept out of the third act, as Chekhov put it, simply is not frightening to those of us brought up on cops-and-robbers and Wcrse, and an intelligent young playwright would make a gun something of a joke by, shall we say, ejecting a blossoming Chinese parasol from it. An all-night booze is now a better way of stimulating extreme behaviour. Let the characters then drop in fumes down the abyss between their dreams and their lives, picking on the way down at the loose scabs which cover their guilty anxieties that the, civilisation so elaborately constructed by others • has made a decent life impossible for them. Tragedy now, and art too, is mostly per- sonal neurosis, so invert the normal creative process, stage a neurotic crack-up and you may by-pass tragedy, and art too. The result can only be to quarrel about relationships, which it would take much smugness to dismiss. Then de- clare its intellectual privacy with a lowbrows-will- be-persecuted title, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and you will have a play which drives into the present like a sliver of glass.

This is what Mr. Albee has done. In case any- one should be tempted to take him seriously, he has protected himself by making the relation- ships into a series of games. 'Play up and play the game' is emblazoned on his characters, a middle-aged couple, Martha and George, old hands on the campus who, at two in the morning, after Martha's father has given a college presi- dential party, invite home the young Honey and Nick, newly arrived in the biology depart- ment. The first game is Humiliate the Host. Martha has been playing it like a routine for over twenty years, exposing George's childhood fantasies, his failure as a historian, and the sup- pression of his novel by her father.

The second game, Hump the Hostess, is a little more inventive. Nick has been encouraged by Martha's cruelty to her husband to think that he can make love to her. It is a fiasco. Says Martha: 'I haven't seen such a dandy potential in a long time. Oh, but baby, you sure are a flop.' It is time for George's game, Get the Guests. He has wormed out the necessary in-; formation to sap their pretences and, as a trained scholar, he makes a thorough job. Only Martha has gone too far; she has boasted about their private game, a concoction about a non-

' existent son whom they have devised to comfort their sterility. George grand-slams to the truth: `There's something inside the bone, the marrow, and that's what you gotta get at.' The play ends with him singing its absurd title while Martha touchingly, even optimistically, answers: am, George, I am.' Was there ever a friendly game?

This is a modern drawing-room comedy, which is to say a comedy in the death-cell. At its frozen surface it has what Shelley called `the withering and perverting spirit of comedy,' but underneath the ice-floes open the darker waters which will engulf us all. The most direct signpost down is the passage from a book which George reads aloud at the end of Act 2. `And the West, encumbered by crippling alli- ances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must eventually fall.' History personified in George, roué, defensive and a failure, 'the bog,' engages with biology, Nick, 'the stud,' aggressive and brutish. 'Up yours,' Nick shouts when he can't bear George's pincer movements any longer, to get this ripe answer:

You take the trouble to construct a civilisa- tion . . . to the point when there is something to lose . . . then all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the Dies Irae. And what is it? what does the trumpet sound? Up yours. I suppose there's justice in it, after all the years.

The women are simpler, specimens of that pure Strindberg reincarnation, the American Female. Honey trapped Nick into marriage with a hysterical pregnancy, 'She went tip and then she went down,' and Martha claims that George wants their marriage to be the way it is. When trapped, however, both of them, like the fox, will bite off a limb to be free. In English this could well strike that mixture of shrewishness and triviality which we reserve for domestic scenes on stage, and which can be so em- barrassing, but in American we squirm with Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill as they show us Martha and George's neuroses, insufficiencies and, perhaps, their hope. The language is like clean snow, trackless and glinting and the acting is what I presume the Method exists for. Reactions to the play will range from blasé boredom and sophistication to every modula- tion of laughter and finally to disgust. This is as good a test of one's friends as any.

DAVID PRYCE-JONES