Family at war | 21 May 2011

Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton.

Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. We’re in a New England mansion whose unshowy opulence is brilliantly suggested by designer Laura Hopkins. The chairs are elegant, costly and fading. The shelves are neatly crammed with dilapidated classics. And on the sideboard a great rash of family photographs hints at an ominous hinterland of family complexities.

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Steely matriarch Agnes, played by Penelope Wilton, is watching her family slide towards total collapse. Her daughter’s fourth marriage has imploded; she suspects her husband Tobias (Tim Pigott-Smith) of concealing an affair; and her sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) has fallen off the first step of the AA programme and landed in a sea of booze. Scabrous insults pitch back and forth.

‘Why don’t you just die?’ says Claire, perfectly passionlessly, to Agnes. Proffering her glass to Tobias and touting for a refill, she says, ‘It’s only the first one I’m not supposed to have.’ Agnes suspects that Claire knows more about Tobias’s infidelities than she’s willing to say but her desire to elicit the truth exposes her to further scorn. Reeling with drink, Claire straps on an accordion and fills the room with bursts of butter-fingered atonality. ‘I can yodel too!’ she threatens.

This is Albee on top form. Sophisticated adults bickering like snide little kids.