By Paul Whitelaw
REVIEWS
When Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered on Broadway in 1962, it was an instant smash. Set over the space of a booze-fuelled night in the unhappy home of a middle-aged, upper middle-class couple, it’s a raw, harrowing, intensely claustrophobic, desperately funny and terribly sad psychodrama hell-bent on eviscerating the hypocrisies of bourgeois western society.
A film adaptation of this Great American Play was the next logical step. As detailed in Cocktails with George and Martha, Philip Gefter’s absorbing account of its production, the 1966 classic starring real-life married couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was beset by behind-the-scenes drama and occasional eruptions of absurd showbiz farce. Like the play itself, Gefter’s story focuses on four protagonists at odds with each other: Burton, Taylor, writer/producer Ernest Lehman and director Mike Nichols. They all believed in the project wholeheartedly, they were united in their commitment to honouring the integrity of Albee’s masterpiece while making a great work of art, but the process comes across as a war of attrition between a quartet of fragile egos.
They all had something to prove. Taylor had never played a role as complex as Martha before. She was 33, a beautiful superstar; Martha is a dishevelled alcoholic in her mid-50s. Taylor worried – everyone worried – that if she couldn’t inhabit the role convincingly, the film would fail. Burton, despite his reputation as one of the greatest living actors, was always deeply insecure. He and Taylor would sometimes fight on set, although they were for the most part consummately professional (granted, they did insist on finishing work each day at 6pm – or ‘bloody mary o’ clock’). Meanwhile, 33-year-old Nichols – au courant theatre director, satirist and schmoozer about town – often butted heads with the older Lehman, an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Burton and Taylor may be the marquee draw, but the amusingly fraught relationship between Nichols and Lehman is the beating heart of this book. They’re a classic odd couple: Nichols a bratty, brilliant and maddening perfectionist; Lehman far more diplomatic and level-headed. The censors-baiting film these peopl
