Players brave Woolf's door

By PETER CALDER

Actors have to imagine a lot when they prepare a play. Doors are created by offhand acts of mime. Cigarettes are held unsmoked. Balding unmatched chairs must stand in for matching furniture yet to be delivered.

But in the well-ventilated rehearsal room above Wellesley St in central Auckland, the booze bottles are real.

They stand in ragged formation along a shelf, upstage right, along with glasses, a soda siphon and not one, but two ice buckets.

They're a reminder that the scene David McPhail and Gareth Reeves are running through is part of a play that is sodden with grog and in which the word "drink" - with the rising inflection of an offer - is repeated so often it takes on the status of a recurring motif.

The curious who try to keep track of the stiff drinks poured and drunk in Edward Albee's 1962 classic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will soon lose count.

And director Colin McColl bursts into laughter at the suggestion that the cast members need a robust liver function.

"I don't know who drinks the most," he says. "But they drink all right. Of course it's not real. I don't know what they're using.

"In my days as a stage manager it used to be cold tea but now they might use herbal tea. Sometimes they have flat ginger ale but that's too sweet for some actors."

The alcohol is not the half of it. Three of the four characters smoke, too, so the toxins ingested are almost equivalent to the toxins expelled as the cast of four enacts one of the landmark plays of 20th-century American theatre.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which has nothing at all to do with the most famous writer of the Bloomsbury Group, is a bleakly funny and unflinching look at a marriage in what looks frighteningly like meltdown.

It is most widely known as the film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the peak of their celebrity.

This, though, is the production that played at the Court Theatre in Christchurch in 2002, prompting the Listener critic to write it "scorches and burns right up to the blazing resolution", while the National Business Review praised its "impeccably pitched performances".

The film was as black as the devil's heart, but McColl reckons Albee wrote a play which is first and foremost very funny. He cast Jennifer Ludlam and David McPhail as the passionate and viciously sparring couple because they were both well known as comedic actors.

"I thought it would give it a different edge," he says. "Especially in the first act, the play is really very funny. You get the idea of George and Martha as very literate and witty people.

"There's a delight in the language you don't get from the film. It's a heightened version of the American vernacular, poetic and amusing and full of allusions."

But he's not playing it for laughs, is he? At heart the play is a sort of domestic tragedy, surely?

"It's a love story," McColl says, without hesitation. "It's about two people who have a deep love for each other but they tear each other apart for a whole lot of reasons."

No matter how tough the going gets - and it gets very tough indeed, he promises - there is hope at the end.

"I've made the ending enigmatic, ambiguous really. It could be them facing a new dawn together or facing the white light of oblivion. I like to define it but not limit it. It's up to the audience what they see."

This is more than domestic melodrama, of course. The main characters' names, the same as those of the United States' founding President and first lady, point up its allegorical intention as a play about a nation that has lost its way.

It was written in the middle of the Cold War - only five days after it opened on Broadway, the events now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis dangled the world over the brink of nuclear apocalypse - and now we are in the middle of a world war Kennedy and the Cubans could never have imagined.

"To revisit it now is quite interesting," McColl says mildly.

The fact that the cast - Gareth Reeves and Hera Dunleavy play the young couple who witness and become ensnared in George and Martha's fun and games - has worked together before allows for a shorter rehearsal period, but McColl says there's still plenty to be done.

"They haven't done it for two years and it's a really big learn, particularly for George.

"It's an enormous role in terms of wordage. And the thing for the actors is that they can remember the effect of scenes from last time but they have to go right back and remember the process of getting there. It's quite tricky because they have to unlearn things or otherwise it could be quite flat."

McColl was persuaded to restage the production here because McPhail, though well-known nationally, has not been seen on an Auckland stage except in his touring solo show Muldoon.

McColl, still settling in as the company's artistic director, welcomed the chance to work with something familiar and, in any case, "it's a good piece," he adds.

"It's scary doing such a classic and it's scary for the actors, too. But it's getting it as finely tuned as it was before. That's the trick."

Performance

* What: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

* Where and when: Maidment Theatre, August 20-September 18