Moving portrait of malice

I left the theatre last night moved and oddly elated by the experience of watching something terrible. Bill Irwin's mild-mannered American history professor, George, and Kathleen Turner as his tough, earthy wife Martha, displaying a languid contempt for him, spend the vulture's share of three hours tearing strips off each other until nothing is left on view but their bare, wounded essences.

Their childless, fantasy-laden marriage, rich in failure and disappointment, has left them addicted to a war of recriminating and acerbic words. A young couple, Nick a cute biology lecturer and his mousily vacuous wife, Honey, are famously caught up in this dark night of the soul. It all happens at two in the morning when the quartet end up hard-drinking together and home-truths start to hit home - below the belt.

Martha, whose daddy runs the university and has never forgiven her husband for not being the dominant man of her dreams, runs sexy, scathing and revealing of intimate secrets until her husband at last turns the tables.

If my response to all this makes me sound like a sadist in the stalls, then the sound misleads. It is true that of all plays in the 20th century Anglo-American repertoire that cut up rough and cruel about marital bad relations none transmits such an embittered or damaging charge as Edward Albee's instant, brutally amusing classic from 1962.

Yet this production by Anthony Page, a big hit when seen on Broadway last year, is not content to relish the sardonic, rapier thrusts or to revel in the theatre's frankest portrait of a marriage that gets its kicks from sadomasochism.

It skates over the play's rather dated historical underpinning, with the couple named after the first presidential couple. Historian George sees the West in terminal decline, consumed by desire for money and power, with liberalism a hopeless culdesac. Nick the biologist sees the future ridiculously in eugenics.

The production conveys the attraction of people who know how to wound with words. Its only weaknesses are David Harbour's nerdish Nick, who lacks the necessary sexual charisma and swagger and the George of Bill Irwin, which despite his mood of desiccated desolation needs sometimes to fire on all emotional cylinders.

The lethally effective, mesmerising Miss Turner, a butch, boozy broad in a middle-age spread of malice, and a tight blouse, does her sadistic bit with all the lazy, nonchalance of a maid swatting flies.

Meanwhile Irwin's much cleverer, mild-mannered George maintains a stiff upper lip as the best of masochists prefer to. He even returns cruel volleys with a mild vengeance. The valuable psychological tilt of Page's production, though, becomes clear in the final act where George takes his revenge on Martha and announces the closure of the fantasy which has sustained their life together.

To reveal the details of the consoling make-believe games that the couple have played would spoil it for those who do not know this drama or the splendid Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film version.