About the performance
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of the most famous and most frequently performed plays of the 20th century. When it first appeared on Broadway in 1962, it upset critics with its brutal language for the time and its harsh vivisection of a marital relationship, but it delighted audiences, filling 664 performances. Similarly, the famous, still admired 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton changed the standards of what was acceptable in Hollywood. In Slovenian theatre, too, the first Virginia Woolf, the legendary production directed by Mile Korun and starring Duša Počkaj as Martha and Jurij Souček as George, with Marija Benka and Danilo Benedičič as the younger couple (1964), marked a new era in theatre acting. It was followed by ten Slovenian productions, all of which were designed as a superb challenge to the actors and an intellectual and emotional challenge to the audience.
The play, which provocatively plays on the children's poem "Who's afraid of the bad wolf" in its title, is set in a university, supposedly genteel intellectual environment, which soon reveals its many problematic and cruel aspects. Two married couples of professors (women are still mostly wives at this time) meet on a long drunken night, the younger one just entering this world, while the middle-aged Martha and Georg are already thoroughly steeped in the demands and conundrums of academia, as well as in juggling, concealing and exposing their complicated relationship. A social evening with their professional colleagues turns into a raging Walpurgis night, with everything at stake: professional ambitions and the dirty ways of achieving them, the importance of money and suspicious sources of wealth, the fear of failure and the fierceness of disappointment in the face of it, the pain of unrealised desires and plans and the aggressive hostility that bubbles up from it, but also the tempting irritation of bold statements and gestures, the delightful wit and the fierce erotic attraction of a woman who seems to be ready for anything. All this is woven into the interplay of their relationships, which are above all personal, the focus being on the life of a couple, in fact two couples, who are enacting the story of a woman and a man caught in an irresolvable cycle of hatred and love. And everything is set in an ambivalent interplay of truth and illusion, where, alongside lies and deceit, self-deception reigns supreme. Even more than the demand for success, this tangle is driven by the myth of personal fulfilment with a child, at which point the fatality of illusion and the need for the truth of love are finally revealed.
Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was, when it was written, a fundamental influence on theatre and film, as well as on the understanding of the world of its time. But it has not aged with the passage of time; its central themes - the demand for success, the myth of the happy family with children, the interplay of illusion and truth - are more alive today than ever. Moreover, the brilliantly written drama, in which the story of a marital relationship unfolds like a thriller through great twists and turns, offers the possibility of fierce acting creations.
Diana Koloini
Who else is afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee, 1962.
Miles of Western Education, Campus, America. Gender roles firmly established. A closed, airtight system. Where, who, with whom, why shared, lived. Ancestral privileges passed on, parent killed off. Game-playing, inversions. Professors' errant behaviour. Even the super-educated instinct still boils. Over gallons of whiskey. Martha, the educated wife of the professor, a closed beast, devours all the men in front of her. Flop on the flop! The spouse does not reach the ancestor, Martha's father. The lover does not achieve a lasting erection. The son is established by fiction. It is as if the son is, so he too can die. The non-having of a courage that resists. The expected role of one's gender. Co-protagonists. Party on party after party, pun. A game for us two. The rules are clear. Alternations of domination. The fiction-fiction dynamic. The woman becomes a threat, Valpurgica. Purgatory at home? For whom? For both! Fiction or reality? Who can know but them. All their plays have a name. The most for-real one could be called "De-construction of the mother". In the absence of her son, Martha is completely derailed by his loss. And her co-protagonist knows it. The two-track absurdity of fiction? The mimetic creation of expected behaviour, the illusion of a role. Marta instinctively suppresses the non-existent child in advance. Sub-version of the non-mother. Is that how it is in the play? A married couple staging a play. On the battlefield at home. Where the rules of the game are established for the couple to adhere to in dialogue, aren't they, Mr. Edward Albee? Virginia Woolf is no longer afraid of the fight.
Manca Majeršič Sevšek
About the author
Edward Albee is often considered one of the greatest contemporary American playwrights, known for his wit, his control of dramatic tension and his understanding of the "drama of the absurd", a movement pioneered by Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. In addition to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), A Delicate Balance (1966) and Three Tall Women (1994). In Slovenia, in addition to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (SNG Drama Ljubljana 1964, SSG Trst 1980, AGRFT 1990, PG Kranj 1990, Drama SNG Maribor 1995, SNG Drama Ljubljana 1997, MGL 2003, SSG Trst 2008, Gledališče Koper 2014, SNG Nova Gorica 2021), his plays American Dream (SNG Drama Ljubljana 1963), The Zoo Story (AGRFT 1966, SLG Celje 1978, Drama SNG Maribor 1997), A Delicate Balance (SNG Drama Ljubljana 1969, MGL 2010), The Garden (MGL 1969, Drama SNG Maribor 1979), The Lady of Dubuque (SSG Trieste 1983), Three Tall Women (MGL 1997) and The Goat or Who is Silvia? (MGL 2005) have also been staged.
In 1972, Albee was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1985, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 1999, he received the PEN/Laura Pels Theatre Award as a Master American Playwright. Three of his plays have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his plays have won the Tony Award for Best Play. He has also received a Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award (2005), the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy, the Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1980), the Kennedy Center Honors, and the National Medal of Arts (both 1996). In 2009, Albee received an Honorary Degree from the Bulgarian National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts (NATFA), a member of the World Alliance of Theatre Schools.
About the director
Ivica Buljan graduated in French Language and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb. He worked as a theatre critic, and in 1995 he started working as a director when he staged Pascal Quignard's The Name at the Top of the Tongue in Ljubljana. He has directed texts by M. Tsvjetaeva, P.P. Pasolini, H. Müller, R. Walser, E. Jelinek, M. Krleža, H. Guibert, A. Hilling, D. Kiš, G. Strniša and R. Bolaño, as well as contemporary local authors F. Šovagović, I. Sajko, Z. Mesarić, D. Ugrešić, D. Karakaša, O. Savičević-Ivančević, G. Vojnović, T. Štivičić. He has directed in Slovenia, USA, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Belgium, Russia, Montenegro, Ivory Coast and Serbia.
From 1998 to 2001 he was Director of Drama at the Croatian National Theatre Split. He is the co-founder of Mini teater in Ljubljana and the World Theatre Festival in Zagreb. He has won numerous Borštnik Awards, the Sterija Award, the Vjesnik Dubravko Dujšin Award, the Branko Gavella Award, the Petar Brečić Award, the City of Havana Medal and the highest award of the Republic of Slovenia in the field of the arts, the Prešeren Fund Award. He is a recipient of the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the Government of the Republic of France.
From 2014 to 2022, he was the director of the Drama of the Croatian National Theatre Zagreb.
From the reviews
"The intimate stage of the Mini teater offers the viewer a sensory and even voyeuristic experience: you seem to be so close that you can watch almost cinematic close-ups of the actors' faces, which you edit yourself with your gaze, like in Eisenstein's montage of attractions. And at the same time, there is also what film cannot give, the theatrical experience of energy and fluidity between actors and audience in the dark."(...) "In Buljan's staging, the actors unleash all the emotional states that a human being is capable of experiencing - from verbal madness, to bawdy humour, to insults, to disgust, to deceit, to malice, to torture ... , but at the same time, in the last scene, exhausted from the fight, Šturbej and Gračner show incredible vulnerability and fragility, which makes you develop empathy for these impossible characters and realise that everyone has their own why and that every executioner is someone's victim." Vesna Milek, Delo
"We admit, we often say that a piece offers the possibility of famous acting creations or that a director's poetics demands them. This is one of the clichés of the discourse on theatre. But in this masterpiece of Albee's, it really is an imperative. If we can imagine anyone daring to undertake it without top-notch actors, now that it is before us, we are actually amazed that someone hadn't thought of casting Nataša Barbara Gračner as Martha earlier. That they simply wanted to perform this piece so that Nataša Barbara Gračner could be in it. And if he gets Branko Šturbe as George and if Ivica Buljan gets it (or, of course, he does, because he is Ivica Buljan), then that's almost a guarantee of a constant acting stampede. She, Nataša Barbara Gračner, goes wild from the first moment. Her register of ways to explode, to blow up everything around her, seems limitless, and her complete collapse when she crosses the final limit is breathtaking. Albee's didaskalia that Martha is a "noisy woman" seems particularly meaningful when interpreted."(...) "The new Slovenian production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is probably not a turning point in Slovenian theatre, nor does it mark the beginning of a new era in theatre, but it does allow for the manifestation of the best of classical drama. It's hardly a play to be ignored by a competitive selection and jury, but that's just a short-term enterprise. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is not a one-season show. I'm sure its unit of measurement could be a decade. It's a show we go to see several times: to check the difference (how will actor/actress say that line this time?) and to measure the ongoing pleasure each time. We don't have many performances like that. In fact, we haven't had them for a while."Petra Vidali, Večer
"Ivica Buljan follows the genre of psychological realism and guides the characters through sharp dialogue situations with a special feeling for all those arbitrary details that reinforce the illusion of liveliness. The cast is completely committed to the genre. It carefully follows the subtext of the lines, the glossed-over meanings and the hidden glances, thus putting the liveliness and the subsequent agonising tension of the situation first."(...) "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is by no means a theatrical novelty, but it is certainly the best that the established conventions of dramatic theatre have to offer. In such productions, they prove to be an unmistakable source of fundamental theatrical pleasure, guided by a thoughtful backstage team and a balanced cast." Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti, Veza Sigledal
“The performance Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? performed by Mini teater at the 71st Ljubljana Festival has confirmed the confidence and success of the production directed by Ivica Buljan, which has already had 28 performances since last September, and after the first one at the festival, the next one will follow on 28 August. The packed Križevniška Church, while intensely watching the performance last night, was at first almost shocked and silent, but then it became more and more open and enthusiastically welcomed the two-hour performance of four actors, or two actresses and two actors without a pause, which is a tremendous effort."(...) "The performance is so powerful that the spectator is more and more "hit"; everything he sees seems to him as unwanted in his own life, and at the same time, perhaps, exaggerated, contrived, vulgarly commercial, just like the primitiveness of thousands of American films, whose scripts no Slovene writer would want to write." (... ) "The show hits the viewer most with its actuality, openness, boldness, its primitiveness and vulgarity, its apparent intellectualism, its personal fakeness, its indifference, its boredom, its marital quarrelsomeness, its feminine provocativeness and its masculine apparent inferiority, its fragments, which speak of George as a writer who reflects on everything that happens in the night hours over a drink in a kind of coracle, in terms of writing material or a test of invention, while slowly reporting the news that their twenty-one-year-old son, while driving to avoid an animal in the road, crashed into a tree and died at the scene. " Marjan Zlobec, Kritik.si:"
Awards
Borštnik Award for acting, Branko Šturbej, 58th Borštnikovo srečanje, Maribor, June 2023
Borštnik Award for Light and Video Design, Sonda 13 and Toni Soprano Meneglejte (Miha Horvat and Metka Golec), 58th Borštnikovo srečanje, Maribor, June 2023
