Ernest Lehman screenplay Edward Albee play. Top credits Director Mike Nichols. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photos Top cast Edit. Elizabeth Taylor Martha as Martha.
Richard Burton George as George. George Segal Nick as Nick. Sandy Dennis Honey as Honey. Mike Nichols. Ernest Lehman screenplay Edward Albee play uncredited. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. George Richard Burton and Martha Dame Elizabeth Taylor are a middle-aged married couple, whose charged relationship is defined by vitriolic verbal battles, which underlies what seems like an emotional dependence upon each other. This verbal abuse is fueled by an excessive consumption of alcohol.
George being an associate history professor in a New Carthage university where Martha's father is the President adds an extra dimension to their relationship. Late one Saturday evening after a faculty mixer, Martha invites Nick George Segal and Honey Sandy Dennis , an ambitious young biology professor new to the university and his mousy wife, over for a nightcap.
As the evening progresses, Nick and Honey, plied with more alcohol, get caught up in George and Martha's games of needing to hurt each other and everyone around them. The ultimate abuse comes in the form of talk of George and Martha's unseen sixteen-year-old son, whose birthday is the following day. It can now be said: 1. Apart from its widespread critical acclaim, it has provoked more discussion, interest and excitement than any other picture in memory. People want to see it - in unprecedented numbers.
Was Albee just being totally random? Probably not. Let's investigate. Virginia Woolf was a writer famous for her stream of consciousness style. Woolf tried to show the emotional truths churning behind the eyes of her characters; she tried to get inside their heads and really show what it was like to be them. Also, Woolf, like Albee, was a product of the upper class. Her work often criticized and peeled back the layers of pretension that masked her social peers.
The fact that Woolf was all about truth and layer peeling, leads some to think that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee goes on to note that the line, and how it makes a play on Virginia Woolf versus the big bad wolf, seemed to him "a rather typical university, intellectual joke. Of course, whenever it shows up in the play, the line is used more as ammunition than a funny ha-ha moment.
The play depicts the tumultuous marriage of Martha and George, a couple of middle-aged intellectuals. They attend a party at the university and meet Nick and Honey, a laid-back and easy-going young couple.
They invite their couple to their home after the party and start slowly smothering them with their emotional difficulties and their deteriorating relationship. Honey rushes off to the toilet to be sick, as she has drunk too much. Nick confides to George that he only married Honey because she had a phantom pregnancy and he felt he had to do the honourable thing. He and Martha pay tribute to their son, on his twenty-first birthday, before George tells his wife that their son has died in a car crash.
When she demands to see the telegram announcing this news, he claims he has eaten it. Kennedy was President, and the United States had a confidence in itself as the leading world superpower. At the same time, tensions with the USSR, particularly over Cuba, led to uncertainty over the future. American life and self-confidence, which had perhaps been at its peak in the s, was beginning to look like a double-edged sword: cosy and comfortable on the outside, but playing host as it were to some darker and more worrying secrets and anxieties.
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