Edward Albee’s enduring masterpiece contains, within its genteel academic and domestic setting, all the attributes of a gladiatorial fight. Nothing less than a tour de force from the two main protagonists can convey the emotional pressure-cooker psyches of George, a crumbling history lecturer at a small New England university, and Martha his frustrated wife, daughter of the College’s President. In Tim Pigott-Smith and Clare Higgins we are served up an excoriating tornado of a performance, rightly greeted at the show’s end with a standing ovation.

Written in 1962, with Who’s Afraid… Albee lobbed a hand grenade right into the saccharine sensibilities of late fifties American middle-class life. The hypocrisies and hidden struggles behind the hard-working family ethic were a natural target for Albee, who when writing the play was surely looking back on his time as an alienated adopted son to staunch Republicans. “By the time I got to develop some sort of awareness of politics and class and all the rest of it, I realised that I was with the enemy,” Albee was to say in an interview in 2008.

Albee was apparently fascinated by people’s ability to create and live out falsehoods or fantasy as coping mechanisms. Who’s Afraid… rips off any social niceties to finally reveal, at its heart, deep animal levels of fear and vulnerability that can be the drivers of dark human behaviour if not confronted.

With spade loads of chutzpah, Clare Higgins has created a monstrous Martha. Booze-fuelled and status-thwarted, she squares up to her sly, self-loathing husband like a prizefighter, goading him to anger, in which state she finally sees fleeting glimpses of the man he might have been. Biting emotional chunks out of each other has long replaced lovemaking for these two. And there is one big shared secret that binds each to the other in a self-denying purgatory, and it gives both of them a nuclear option over the other should it be revealed. The ‘skeleton in the closet’ is the great driver of the play, and the nearer Martha and George get to pushing the red button through their emotional games playing, sucking the hapless Nick and Honey (Nathan Wiley and Iris Roberts) into their vortex, the nearer the precipice looms for both. But at the death redemption of sorts will flicker from the ashes.

With brilliant direction from Adrian Noble on a clever set by Mike Britton, Tim Pigott-Smith’s journey into the tortured soul of George is an opportunity not to miss – a twentieth-century American classic running on the highest octane. ★★★★★ Simon Bishop

Photos by Nobby Clark