Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?

Edward Albee’s most successful play owes its title to an unknown barfly with a love of literature and a sense of humour. Years before writing the drama, Albee discovered the words Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? scrawled on a mirror in a New York bar. In 1962 he decided to rename his work in progress – a play tentatively called Exorcism – after this reworking of the popular song title Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?. That song was composed by Frank Churchill for the Walt Disney short film The Three Little Pigs in 1933. Churchill’s inspiration for the song was a childhood trauma: one of his three pet pigs was killed by a wolf. It took him just five minutes to write the ditty.

Edward Albee considered this play on words to be a “typically intellectual joke” and said, “Who’d laugh at something like that but a couple of drunk academics?”. Over the years there’s been much speculation about the drama’s connection to Virginia Woolf, the English writer whose avant-garde writing style, unconventional sex life and eventual suicide in 1941 made her world famous. Albee himself said the question Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? could be rephrased as “Who’s afraid of a life without illusions?”

This “nasty little three-act play” – as one critic described it after the premiere at New York’s Billy Rose Theatre in 1962 – enjoyed a two year run on Broadway, and brought Albee international acclaim and countless awards. The play made its German-language debut in 1963, at Berlin’s Schiller Theater, under the direction of Boleslaw Barlog. Mike Nichols’ film version of 1966, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis und George Segal won 5 Oscars – including Best Actress for Taylor and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Dennis. In 2004 Jürgen Gosch’s new staging of the play at the Deutsches Theater Berlin was the theatrical event of the year in Germany. The production received numerous honours, including an invitation to stage the play at Berlin’s Theatertreffen – an annual festival that presents the year’s best productions in German-language theatre, and the audience award of the Theatergemeinde Berlin. In addition, the production was nominated for the Nestroy Prize, Austria’s most important theatrical award. For his role as George, Ulrich Matthes was named “Actor of the Year” by an independent jury of theatre critics and won the Gertrud Eysoldt Ring for outstanding acting performance. Corinna Harfouch was runner-up in the Actress of the Year category.

The production travelled to Liechtenstein, Caracas, Bogotá and Prague, and appeared at international festivals like Vienna’s Festwochen. In Germany the play was performed at the International May Theatre Festival in Wiesbaden, with future appearances slated for the Akzente Festival in Duisburg, Munich’s Kammerspiele and Hamburg’s Playhouse.