Introduction
Observe the seriousness of young children engrossed in their play. To be sure, play can furnish them with a context for social learning. Yet it can also offer opportunities for the retrospective processing of past experiences, some of which may have been, to a greater or lesser extent, upsetting, disconcerting, baffling, frightening, exhilarating. Such are the vicissitudes of childhood. Perhaps this is why an interval of tranquillity can constitute a most welcome sequela when the turbulence of a recent game has passed. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? depicts adults playing like children, but whether George and Martha’s marriage will ever find a place of tranquillity is a question left open until the last minute. They seem to have invented a bizarre game of make-believe designed to shield them against a painful, unspeakable reality. The foregoing is sufficient to ensure that theatre critics have some justification in speculating that this play might speak meaningfully to the field of psychoanalysis. Yet what is less obvious is whether the play’s psychoanalytical insights or suggestions are to be found at the level of plot and character, which for this play is the level of an ostensible realism, or whether they may be found at some other level, a structural level, perhaps, or the levels of allegory or metaphor. It was a question present in my mind when I went to see a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at The Loft Theatre, Leamington Spa, on Tuesday 10th May, 2022.
Shumanities 