Gillian Anderson is to return to the West End in a job she has coveted “for decades”. The Sex Education star will seem reverse Billy Crudup in a revival of Edward Albee’s marital meltdown traditional Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the autumn. Staged in-the-round, the manufacturing shall be directed by Marianne Elliott at the intimate @sohoplace theatre.
Anderson will play Martha who spars with her professor husband George over drinks with a younger married couple in the 1962 play. “Martha’s rage is inseparable from her longing, her disappointment and her need to be seen – all things still eminently relatable 60 years on,” stated Anderson. The function was first performed on Broadway by Uta Hagen, on display screen a number of years later by Elizabeth Taylor (reverse her husband Richard Burton) and in a 1996 London revival by Diana Rigg. “I’ve wanted to play Martha for decades,” stated Anderson. “I’m thrilled Billy Crudup is joining me in the ring as George.”
Crudup is turning into a London theatre common. The star of The Morning Show made his West End theatre debut in 2024 portraying 19 characters in a solo present, Harry Clarke. He returned for a musical model of the western High Noon which closed earlier this month. Anderson’s London theatre roles have included Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a sensation at the Young Vic theatre in 2014, and Broadway star Margo Channing in All About Eve, based mostly on the Hollywood traditional, in 2019.
Elliott, whose upcoming tasks embody directing Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George at the Barbican subsequent summer time, stated: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play of astonishing emotional precision – brutal, witty and deeply human.”
Designed by Miriam Buether, the present shall be produced by Nica Burns, the proprietor of @sohoplace, and by Sonia Friedman Productions. Burns described it as “the first American classic” to be introduced at the new theatre, which opened in 2022. For Friedman, it’s “one of the defining plays of the modern theatre – raw, ferociously funny and devastating in equal measure”.
The play, which may even star Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn, runs from 21 September to 19 December.
