Images of the sandbox by edward albee
It is a portrait and exploration of everything he has always defined himself against, and thus in some ways an inverted autobiography in the final act he himself appears as a returned prodigal, a silent presence watching over her death bed.Įdward was born to a woman called Louise Harvey, whom he has not tried to trace, on Maall that is known about her is that is that she was abandoned by the baby's father. Three Tall Women, essentially a factual biography of his adoptive mother, is the most deeply personal of his plays. Among American playwrights he ranks alongside Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and like them he has suffered critical rejection: The Goat was his return to Broadway after an absence of 19 years and is the continuation of a late flowering that began with 1991's Three Tall Women, the first play for which Albee remembers receiving nearly unanimous good notices in the American press, and, when it transferred to London in 1994, his first play in the West End for 20 years. He has written 28 plays over 44 years, but as he wrote in the programme notes for the Almeida's 1996 revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that play, premiered on Broadway in 1962, has "hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort - really nice but a trifle onerous".
Which, incidentally, highlights a problem for Albee, of which he is well aware. It had a much more shattering effect on me than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? " There is a feeling that lacks the courage of its darkest convictions." The Guardian's Michael Billington, however, believes that it is Albee's best play. There is too little of the breathless dramatic momentum for which Mr Albee can usually be relied on. Ben Brantley of the New York Times thought it contained "some of the most potentially powerful scenes in the Albee canon", but a "lack of emotional credibility is a problem throughout. USA Today's Elysa Gardner called it a "self-indulgent mess", a "cynical, disdainful view of family life". The Goat received mixed reviews when it opened in the US, and that too is typical - it also received a Tony Award for Best Play. The Goat, which receives its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London this month, is in many ways a distillation of Albee: discomfiting (it is about a fêted architect who falls in love with a goat) experimental very funny, and yet utterly serious in its concerns: the confounding nature of love, the necessary breaking of innocence, the life-giving properties of danger, the dark voids that gape under the most polished, most privileged surfaces, the problem, once these have been perceived, of going on living. "T here is chaos behind the civility, of course," reads a stage direction in Edward Albee's 2002 play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, and while, like all his many stage directions, it is dauntingly specific to the lines that follow, it is also not a bad summation of a typical Albee play.