Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Sydney Theatre Company Turns Domestic Warfare into High Art.

If there’s one thing the Sydney Theatre Company knows how to do, it’s staging a domestic disaster with devastating precision. On opening night of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Roslyn Packer Theatre became a pressure cooker of intellect, desire, and disillusionment - a middle-class minefield where love and loathing share the same oxygen. The result was electrifying - a night in which laughter and dread arrived arm in arm and refused to leave quietly.

Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece has lost none of its sting. More than sixty years since it scandalised Broadway, it remains a scathing autopsy of marriage, ambition, and the social rituals that keep despair so immaculately dressed. Beneath its whisky-soaked repartee lies a work of surgical precision, one that challenges actors and audience alike. Under Sarah Goodes’ deft direction, the play feels not merely revived but revitalised - sharper, funnier, and more self-aware than ever.

Just another quiet night in... with a side of emotional demolition.

Goodes, a Helpmann Award-winning director celebrated for Julia and Sunday, approaches Albee’s play with an almost scientific equilibrium. She understands the necessity of rhythm - the slurred cadences, the brittle transitions from charm to cruelty - ensuring that what could easily devolve into theatrical shouting becomes instead a symphony of psychological precision. Her direction, first honed in Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre’s 80-seat Melbourne premiere in 2023 and then expanded for The Comedy Theatre in 2024, now blooms to full scale in Sydney without losing its claustrophobic pulse. Each beat lands like the click of a trap closing.

At its heart are Kat Stewart and David Whiteley - real-life partners as Martha and George - whose mutual familiarity becomes both their weapon and their wound. Stewart, making her long-awaited STC debut, is ferocious and magnetic. Best known for her television work in Underbelly and Offspring, she brings feline grace and an unrelenting emotional intelligence to the role. Her Martha claws at the walls of her own privilege, demanding attention from a world that long ago stopped listening. Her performance shimmers with contradiction - part seduction, part self-immolation.

Whiteley’s George, by contrast, is a study in repressed venom. Viciously professorial, quick-witted yet quietly wounded, he exudes the exhausted charm of a man who has made cruelty his last surviving form of intimacy. His tone oscillates between sardonic calm and sudden eruption, suggesting a mind forever at war with its own civility. Together, Stewart and Whiteley are incandescent - their chemistry so combustible you can almost feel the temperature shift with every exchange. Their marriage, steeped in booze and mutual dependency, becomes a metaphor for the human condition itself: too aware to be happy, too entangled to let go.

The supporting duo, Honey and Nick, are far more than passive spectators to this domestic spectacle. Emily Goddard’s Honey, initially played for tipsy levity, slowly unravels into something fragile and unsettling - a reminder that complicity can be its own kind of tragedy. Harvey Zielinski, who identifies as transmasculine and has impressed in Hir and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, lends Nick an air of simmering ambition and disillusionment. His brash confidence, eroded scene by scene, underscores Albee’s cruel brilliance: everyone here is performing, and no one remembers the lines anymore.

Harriet Oxley’s design captures that paradox beautifully. The living room - all amber lamplight, threadbare upholstery, and books stacked like monuments to lost ambition - feels both spacious and suffocating. The ever-present bar sits centre stage, a silent accomplice to every emotional escalation. Matt Scott’s lighting shifts from gentle warmth to clinical exposure as the night unravels, while Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter’s sound design hums beneath the dialogue like an impending breakdown. Subtle video projections by Charlie Bowyer warp the domestic space, giving the illusion that even the walls are complicit in the deceit.

Goodes enriches Albee’s already intricate structure with short, dreamlike interludes that accentuate the enigma of George and Martha’s “child” - theatre’s most haunting metaphor for the fictions we nurture to survive one another. The illusion of the perfect family, the imaginary child as emotional currency, feels eerily current in an era addicted to performance - social, professional, digital.

At three hours and twenty minutes (with two merciful intervals), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains an endurance test - but one that rewards every minute. The tension builds with the discipline of a sonata: motifs recur, rhythms tighten, until emotional carnage becomes catharsis. What begins as farce blooms into tragedy, and by the end, we’re left with silence so heavy it feels physical.

This production is not simply a revival but a reinvigoration. It takes Albee’s scalpel and makes fresh incisions into our contemporary anxieties - about success, failure, and the fictions we construct to outwit loneliness. George and Martha’s torment feels oddly timeless, their self-destruction echoing modern relationships bound by image and inertia. They are, perhaps, our most elegant monsters.

Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reaffirms the play’s place as one of the great modern tragedies disguised as a comedy. It’s savage, sexy, and uncomfortably funny - a masterclass in rhythm, restraint, and ruin. And if you can, sit in the first two rows. The closer you are, the more it hurts - and the more you’ll want to applaud through the ache.

Verdict: A volcanic blend of intellect and intoxication - Albee would have approved.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Sydney Theatre Company.