Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at 60: Elizabeth Taylor still crackles with feral energy
After a long day at work, we may not instinctively leap to films about toxic marriages and relationship breakdowns – but by God they can make good drama.Blue Valentine, The Squid and the Whale and A Separation are some of the great portraits of love turned septic.But perhaps greatest of all is Mike Nichols’ directorial debut – a sizzling adaptation of Edward Albee’s legendary Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which arrived in 1966, four years after the play, and helped cement it in the zeitgeist.The film was nominated for every eligible Academy award and won five, including best actress for Elizabeth Taylor, who delivers a searing performance as the ferocious yet vulnerable Martha.It’s lost none of its gut-busting charge today and her brilliantly performed experience still crackles with emotional electricity.
The drama takes place over the course of one long booze and bile-filled evening between Martha and her husband, George, played by an equally astonishing Richard Burton.Watching him and Taylor go at it is a masterclass in screen acting – if not a bit unpleasant.It doesn’t take long for the principal characters to start sniping, and things get very nasty very quickly.Take, for example, their equivalent of pillow talk: lying in bed, Martha tells George “you’re going bald”, to which he responds “so are you” – and not in a gently ribbing way.When she tells him she can drink him under the table, he shoots back: “There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won.
”Their dynamic in these early scenes is testy, even volcanic, but nothing compared with what’s coming when they’re joined later in the evening by a much younger married couple: Nick (George Segal) – who works in the same university as George – and Honey (Sandy Dennis).It’s perhaps not Martha and George’s finest hour, though it’s hard to imagine them as paragons of virtue even while sober.In fact, they’re living testaments to that old saying: “misery likes company”.These are not people who are prepared to drink by themselves or sit and stew; they want to share their pain and bring others down with them.There are only four characters, with one very interesting exception: Martha and George’s son, whose presence hangs over everything despite him never being named or seen – or even existing.
Early on, Martha mentions him to Honey, telling her that his 16th birthday is the following day.This upsets George, and we later realise that merely mentioning their son betrays a special pact between them.It’s famously revealed, deep into the runtime, that this son is a fiction shared between them: a protective shield, perhaps, distracting them from their loneliness and emotional seclusion.The meaning of this twist, though, is up for grabs, enabling all sorts of readings about the story’s metaphorical essence.The Guardian’s Michael Billington described it as being in part about “the stock American theme of truth and illusion”, arguing that Nichols’ film stamped the play “in the public mind as a liquor-fuelled marital slugfest”, pushing critical readings away from its commentaries about the state of America.
Maybe that was inevitable, given the immediacy of the film format compared with the very literal distance between the audience and the actors in stage productions.Nichols does indeed get right up in the characters’ faces.Sometimes the frame moves slowly, and sometimes in sharp and unexpected ways; sometimes the camera is fixed and sometimes it swings madly about.Always, the staging feels closely tuned to the performers, sometimes very uncomfortably so; you can practically smell the rancidness of their breath.Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is available to stream on HBO Max in Australia and available to rent in Australia, the UK and the US.
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What does loneliness smell like? Inside the strangely soothing world of fragrance TikTok
I was bestowed with a nickname throughout my younger years: Smellanor. When I decided to go by Elle, the nickname evolved with it: Smell. I’m always a sucker for a fun rhyme. But it did make me hypervigilant about maintaining what I actually smelled like, vowing that this moniker would never manifest itself into reality. Thus began my ongoing journey into the wild world of fragrances
Claire Hooper: ‘People have different forms of therapy. Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age is mine’
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‘The dream is to be a standup, but everyone who knows me says: Please don’t’ – Riz Ahmed on chaos, comedy, and defying categorisation
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‘A fascinating discovery’: research challenges Battle of Hastings narrative
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Driven to the right side of the road? | Brief letters
From the answer to question five of The kids’ quiz (14 March), we learn that people in Britain drive on the left-hand side of the road to keep their right hand free for sword fighting. Does that mean that just about everywhere else in the world people drive on the right-hand side of the road to keep their left hand free for shield wielding?Simon ChapmanMarseille, France In the Saturday quiz (14 March), Glengarry Glen Ross is named as one of four “films with no female characters”. In fact the film does credit “Coat check girl”, played by Lori Tan Chinn, who delivers the immortal line: “Slow tonight.”Rendel HarrisLondon On children fibbing (Letters, 19 March), my brother, the late Tom Hibbert (of Smash Hits, Q magazine and Observer fame), showed early promise of invention when asked by our mother how a large tear in his trousers had appeared. He replied rather scornfully: “Haven’t you heard of moths what eat holes in people’s clothes?”Jimmy Hibbert Porthmadog, Gwynedd Somebody should advise Robin, who said he was looking for someone 5ft 6in tall, what my father once said to me (Blind date, 14 March)
Jimmy Kimmel on Trump Pearl Harbor joke: ‘Everything he knows about it begins and ends with the Ben Affleck movie’
With The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on hiatus until at least 27 March, late-night hosts on Thursday discussed Donald Trump’s snafu while meeting Japan’s prime minister, his caginess over Iran, and new findings in the Epstein investigations.On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host discussed Trump meeting with Sanae Takaichi at the White House. As a welcome gift, the Japanese prime minister presented the US president with 250 cherry trees to commemorate the upcoming 250th US anniversary.“This is a guy who paved over the Rose Garden,” commented Kimmel. “What is he going to do with 250 cherry trees? He’ll probably use them to build a Waffle House or something
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