Roslyn Packer Theatre, November 11
9/10
“I do not bray!” brays Martha, responding to George’s gibe that she does. What other play than Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece is so funny while being so savage? Precious few are blessed with a character as venomous as Martha who – miraculously – makes us like her. But then this alchemy cannot occur without an actor who can wither with one look and split our sides with the next.
Kat Stewart’s certainly that. This is a performance that will throb in the memory bank long after age has pilfered most of them. Stewart’s light-switch mood changes are scary enough; her Martha’s rage is cyclonic, her intellect formidable, her capacity for alcohol bottomless and the terror on her face near the end heartbreaking.
She somehow makes you feel Mattha’s backstory: the girl who grew up motherless, her father too preoccupied with establishing a New England college to show interest. So Martha craved attention as much as she craved love. Then she met George, and thought him the right horse to ride in academia’s upwardly mobile stakes.
George might have proved a flop in terms of ambition (which she’ll never let him forget), but she loved him because he understood her, and was willing to play the games she devised – a joy she’d never had as a child.
To pull off such a multidimensional performance, Stewart needs the right George, and, just as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married when they played Martha and George in Mike Nichols’ timeless film, so Stewart is married to her George, David Whiteley. If Whiteley’s performance doesn’t quite scale Stewart’s heights, he’s on the same mountain face. His George is witty, mostly subdued, sometimes wet and always exhausted by trying to keep with Martha. Whiteley has him stretched thin like fuse wire, so there’s an electricity in who will snap first, however well you know the play.
Sarah Goodes’ production has been polished across three lives, beginning as a Red Stitch production in that company’s tiny Melbourne home, moving to the grander Comedy Theatre and now becoming a Sydney Theatre Company co-presentation.
Harvey Zielinski plays Nick, the hot-shot new faculty member who’s intent on climbing the college ladder, bed by bed. Emily Goddard plays Honey, his bewildered wife, uprooted from the Midwest, and trapped in a loveless marriage. Both mostly shine as their characters totter into George and Martha’s nihilistic void, where secrets are wheeled out as weapons of war.
Goodes’ seamless directing is replete with glistening touches in the 3D pictures she paints, expertly supported by Harriet Oxley’s set, Matt Scott’s lighting and Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter’s sparse but telling music.
The intensity flagged a smidgen in act three, just when it should be as taut as drawn bow. At three-and-a-half hours, the play asks big questions of the actors: ones they otherwise meet full-frontally, and none more than Stewart.
Until December 14.