REVIEWS
Art imitating life in a war of egos
When Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered on Broadway in 1962, it was an instant smash. Set over the space of a booze-fuelled night in the unhappy home of a middle-aged, upper middle-class couple, it’s a raw, harrowing, intensely claustrophobic, desperately funny and terribly sad psychodrama hell-bent on eviscerating the hypocrisies of bourgeois western society.
A film adaptation of this Great American Play was the next logical step. As detailed in , Philip Gefter’s absorbing account of its production, the 1966 classic starring real-life married couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was beset by behind-the-scenes drama and occasional eruptions of absurd showbiz farce. Like the play itself, Gefter’s story focuses on four protagonists at odds with each other: Burton, Taylor, writer/producer Ernest Lehman and director Mike Nichols. They all believed in the project wholeheartedly, they were united in their commitment to honouring the integrity of Albee’s masterpiece while making a
