Gillian Anderson revels in the bile of this sell-out 3hr 20min booze cruise of marital acrimony that opens the gates of domestic hell: PATRICK MARMION reviews Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

Welcome back to Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? – one of the toughest, most gruelling gigs in all of theatre, for actors and audiences alike.

Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup’s mission impossible, in this new production at London’s shiny Soho Place, is to redeem – or even just make us care about – the leading characters in Edward Albee’s exhausting marital breakdown drama from 1962.

Sometimes clocking in at four hours, the play’s remorseless drunken invective and psychological manipulation has here been condensed into a booze cruise of just three hours and 20 minutes.

That includes one interval, to fortify ourselves at the bar; and ‘a brief pause’, to thwart those hoping to escape.

It is best known from Mike Nichols’ 1966 film starring five-times married Richard Burton and eight-times married Elizabeth Taylor (who married each other twice).

Here, it’s two-times-married Anderson who opens the batting as middle-aged Martha, returning from a drinks party at the fictional East Coast university of New Carthage, where her father is its president.

Joined by a young couple – biologist Nick (Josh Dylan) and his mousey wife Honey (Phoebe Horn) – Martha shows off by systematically humiliating her husband George (Crudup, married just once, to actress Naomi Watts).

He dutifully refreshes her glass with shots of gin, served – like their relationship – on the rocks.

But soon it’s George’s turn to push the envelope, ridiculing his wife’s dipsomania, and outraging the guests with indiscretions and provocations of his own.

Martha hits back by throwing herself at the buff young biologist, while his clean-living wife lies in a stupor on the bathroom floor.

Between them, Anderson and Crudup procure nervous laughter for the first hour of bitter recriminations. 

Still riding high after the publication of her encyclopedia of women’s sexual fantasies, Want, and its follow-up, More, plus the success of her latest cinema release, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Anderson looks like she’s just popped out of a wellness clinic.

Despite appearing altogether too healthy for raging alcoholic Martha, Anderson revels in her bile – scarlet talons complementing her turquoise cashmere cardie and green-patterned pedal-pushers.

Crudup looks like the classic grey man, but beneath that defeated exterior lurk sly wiles – and barefaced tricks of his own. 

He is contemptuous, yet curious, in a forensically detailed performance as the crumpled academic with the life force of a twitching cadaver.

Laughs in the second hour grow thinner – and in the third, when it all seems to have gone too far, they start drying up altogether. But 20 acrimonious minutes still remain.

This interminable verbal slugfest is a love-hate affair for the audience, as well as Martha and George. 

Either way, we must salute the cast for literally making a good fist of it. And Marianne Elliott’s production is correspondingly relentless, set in a brown rotating bear pit, with orange furniture and yellowing books – and that all-important drinks trolley at the centre.

It is, in the end, an attritional tale, the pleasure of which lies in its opening the gates of domestic hell. 

That won’t work for people who are already there, and may feel superfluous to those who aren’t.

This top-of-the-range torture is now sold out. But I’ll put folding money on it appearing in cinemas this winter. Until December 19.