In-house review by Trevor Williams

Trevor Williams has been a member of the Company for more than 40 years as performer, artistic director and chairman. As a student at Cambridge he was a member of the Marlowe Society and the Footlights.

This was an excellent production of a baffling play. In the light of it one may ask why does Edward Albee write plays at all, why did he write this play and indeed why does he trouble to get out of bed in the morning and sustain his melancholic existence with coffee and bagels only to walk to the typewriter and the lonely angst of playwriting?
The answer may be that it is what he does. He is good at it and just as some musical people become good musicians and some cunning far-sighted people become successful businessmen, so Albee has the intelligence, the observation of conduct and character and the concision of language to make a good playwright.
Some vitality drives him to it. He is no mere cynic. He does get up and write those plays and bring life to the theatre, but he is trapped in the limitations of his own perception. His is a bleak and mordant talent, which exposes his subjects without sentiment but also without much enlightenment. A lesser writer would swathe Albee's disagreeable topics in emotionalism and a greater would point the audience at the play's end to a deeper sympathy with the plight which Albee draws with such discomforting clarity. Nevertheless his vigour and descriptive accuracy always make for a lively theatrical event and command attention.
Albee's motive in writing Three Tall Women may have been personal and related to his own adoptive mother, but the miseries of old age are certainly a topic of general public interest to which a playwright may turn for its own sake. With increasing longevity, amnesia, dementia paranoia and physical debility of which Albee draws a harsh account cloud the final years of many lives.
To this, however, he has added in full measure what better or more fortunate old people may still avoid: the bitterest regrets and recriminations at past disappointments, unrelieved by any forgiveness or reconciliation. This final assessment of his mother's life, upon which he has touched in earlier work, gives the play an added personal intensity from which it benefits theatrically but is also a warning, perhaps unintentional to any parents or child not to seek independence or understanding at the price of compassion.
Zizi Sulkin's production was stark, and vital. She was well served by Dorothy Wright's splendid set, cool, elegant and beautifully furnished and by the well-chosen costumes and nicely controlled lighting. The whole presentation enhanced the objective spirit of the writing and the acting.
The play offers little scope for physical action and while the production was static it was best to avoid the temptation of motiveless movement and to keep the actors focused on the text. The three actors, no doubt carefully directed, mastered the text, bringing to it life, colour and variety, with many well pointed touches of irony and paradox, thus retaining interest and sympathy through what could, in different hands, have been a very drab evening.
The format of the play is ingenious but not easy to perform. It entails women B and C playing two distinct parts each. In the first more naturalistic Act, Annie Connell as woman B, the nurse, and Meg Meagher as woman C, the lawyer, apart from being good listeners to the monologues of elderly woman A, drew firm contrasting characters typifying the resignation of the carers and the disgust off the occasional visitors at the problem of senility.
For them there was the difficult transition to Act II, in which they were required to play A in her earlier life, B in her middle age and C in her youth. Despite clear changes of costume and character, it took a while to shake off the nurse and the lawyer, but they achieved it and moved our interest to the play's main theme, the state of A and how she came to it.
As the central character, woman A, Penny Tuerk delivered a tour de force. It is a huge part written within a restricted dramatic ambience. She played it with all variety and fluency and spiced it with a glinting panache which helped make even this grim play enjoyable.
Perhaps the best feature of a very good production was the alert co-operation between all three actors. They and the director had given attention to every detail and possibility of the script and they received their reward in a fully satisfied audience.