Waiting for the show

Sitting in the front row waiting for the show to start. The Grads' production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Assembly Roxy. An 'extreme thrust' staging that presumably is intended to put the audience right in the action but I wasn't convinced that it really worked and that a more conventional 'pros arch' might actually have worked better. An interesting play that is part of the modern canon. It is now over fifty years old and I wonder if it suffers from being too old to be strictly relevant to a modern audience but not old enough to allow the director to take liberties with the script in order to bring it up to date (as people can do with Shakespeare for example)? Early on I felt there might be aspects of modern politics in Scotland and the UK that might resonate but much of the allegory is concerned with the United States at the start of the 1960s. The dysfunctional couple at the heart of the play are perhaps more recognisable to a modern audience than the political symbolism. Good to see it performed, although the audience was a little sparse - were people put off by the running time of over three and a half hours or the subject matter, or is there just not an audience for this sort of amateur theatre? Good work from the cast of four, the odd wobble in the accents aside. I felt that the energy was a little low at the start - a classic 'second night problem' perhaps - but it had picked up by the dramatic finale. Gripping stuff.