"Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Edward Albee
Directed by Maria Panourgia
Dates
Tickets
Venue
Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends Presale: from 12 NOV 2018, 12:00
General Presale: from 19 NOV 2018, 12:00
Full price: 7, 15 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 12€
Groups 10+ people: 11€
Νeighborhood residents: 7 €
People with disabilities & Unemployed: 5 € | Companions: 8 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
Duration
2 hours and 10 minutes
Surtitles
At weekends 15-16 and 22-23 December 2018 with English surtitles
Introduction
Two couples and their relationships hit rock bottom. A long, wild, brutal night. Marriage is no longer sacred. A legendary play, forever associated with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton thanks to the film of the same name, is to be staged at the Onassis Stegi as a “living museum” of behaviours from decades past.
Two couples stay up late drinking copious quantities of alcohol. The party begins. Emotions bide their time, ready to set the sanctity of marriage, the very heart of Western civilization, ablaze. Knowledge is used to neutralize—and neuter—the other. In the living room-jungle, they set traps for each other and wait to snare their prey.
Maria Panourgia directs this classic American work free of illusions. She gives us a ‘stuffed’ bourgeois sitting room full of relics of the past, and leaves the radio on. She’s interested in the morbidity of relationships, but also in the era in which “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” plays out—an era it encapsulates like a time capsule.
And as the murder of a child slowly comes to the surface, Maria Panourgia invites us to view the work with which Albee rocked Sixties’ audiences as a “living museum” of behaviours past.
Photo: Nikolay Biryukov
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered" in 1962 in New York, where it caused a stir, winning Tony and Drama Critics Circle awards.
In 1966, it was adapted for the cinema by Mike Nickols with a pair of leads legendary both for their performances and their own marital squabbles: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The film won two Oscars.
The work’s title is a play on the song "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?", which was heard for the first time in Walt Disney’s animated "Three Little Pigs" in 1933. Edward Albee replaced “wolf” with the name of the English writer and suicide Virginia Woolf, asking us to ponder “Who isn’t afraid of a life without illusions?".
The radio serves as a fifth voice in Maria Panourgia’s production: from it, we will hear extracts from "Moon over Africa" (1937–8), an American radio program broadcasting stories from the deepest, darkest Africa. Combined with news and announcements, these become the production’s “libretto”.
Credits
Many thanks to Bessis Textile Imports
Embedded media
If you want to enjoy embedded rich media, please customize your cookie settings to allow for Performance and Targeting cookies. Your data may be transferred to third-party services such as YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Issuu.