So here's why I've been flying along the Australian coastline like a confused fruitbat. From today's Australian, your peripatetic crrritic reports:

The phone rang. A mysterious voice crawled out of the receiver. Somebody, the voice whispered, is peddling productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? All over Australia. What’s the deal?

It was a slow week. A slow year. Whatever. So I poured the rubbing alcohol down the sink and pulled out my gumshoes, and ever since I’ve been wearing a groove up and down the eastern coast, tracking down the knowledge on Edward Albee’s classic marital bloodfest.

Company B at Belvoir Street in Sydney lit the flame at the beginning of August, with an auteur production directed by Benedict Andrews. The Melbourne Theatre Company followed panting on its heels, with a season directed by Peter Evans; and finally, the Queensland Theatre Company opens today with another by Michael Gow.

Is it that the zeitgeist is zinging with Albee? Does this 40-year-old play express something urgent about our time? Or is it simply that, following hallowed Australian theatrical tradition, our major companies looked across the pond to New York?

I guess it’s a bit of both; but it’s hard not to incline to the latter theory. Main stage Australian theatre takes most of its cues from the West End and Broadway, and it’s hardly coincidental that Kathleen Turner has been starring in a celebrated Broadway revival since 2005.

And – after a certain amount of hemming and hawing and stroking of chins – it no doubt dawned on various company directors that this play is not only a classic, it is hot. And hit is, after all, a mere vowel away…

I’ve now sat through around ten hours of George, Martha and the gang; and it seems to me that, whatever the reason, all the chin-stroking was to good effect.

Woolf’s international revival is part of a late-career comeback that Albee has been enjoying since the early 1990s. After his early 1960s successes, his career trotted along nicely until everything fizzled in the 1980s, when Albee’s brand of dark, visceral mischief went out of fashion. Then, in 1991, Three Tall Women garnered him his third Pulitzer, and suddenly, like a rather cantankerous prodigal son (he turns 80 next year), Albee was back in the limelight.

Despite the compulsory homilies about relevance, topicality and so on, there’s only one real reason to put any play on. It has to be good. If it’s good, it will always be relevant.

Woolf is a great play. Given the kind of play it is, it has to be. Theatre has changed since the 1960s, but Albee hasn’t swum with the times.

As he told the LA Weekly earlier this year, Albee believes that theatre’s job is solely to interpret a writer’s vision. “The big problem,” he said, “is the assumption that writing a play is a collaborative act. It isn’t. It’s a creative act, and then other people come in... I’m in the lucky position where I just say, ‘Go fuck yourself; if you don’t want to do the play I wrote, do another play’.”

It’s an understandable attitude, when you consider the brutal commercial waters in which contemporary US playwrights are forced to swim: but Albee sometimes gets close to accusing theatre of being a massed conspiracy against the solitary genius of his writing. Luckily, he’s excellent at what he does.

Still, Albee’s mid-century, writer-dominant approach to theatre can give his aesthetic a fusty air. Like Arthur Miller’s plays, and unlike Shakespeare, or even the passionately lyrical plays of his contemporary Tennessee Williams, Albee’s work doesn’t easily bear radical interpretation.

Although Martin Esslin claimed Albee for the Absurdists, from this end of the telescope a play like Woolf looks more at home with, say, Death of a Salesman than with Ionesco. Its naturalistic poetic stamps its diction indelibly with its own time. The question is whether it can be reworked for the 21st century, or whether it must remain in its own, an unsettling mirror flashing out of our past.

Albee himself believes the latter. As Miller was in his lifetime, Albee is notoriously protective of his work, refusing interpretations of Woolf that compromise its 1960s setting. Benedict Andrews’ production for Belvoir Street came within a whisker of being cancelled when Albee saw the design, and was only saved by some very fast talking.

Andrews’ was by the far the most adventurous of the three productions, an aggressive attempt to drag it into the present day. It featured a gorgeously chic set, all mirrors and glass and ice, and stylised performances which at their most powerful moments revealed an unexpectedly operatic extremity in the writing. What Andrews exposed was the play’s profound theatricality.

Still, I had reservations. Despite a stunning performance of cumulatively powerful understatement from Marton Csokas as George, it suffered from uneven casting, making it clear that this play is crucially a quartet. The cool design was matched by coolly alienating direction, a slow drawing of viscera which made for a sluggish first act.

As the set disintegrated, like the respectable façades of Albee’s characters, into a smeared, tear-stained mess, Andrews exploited its reflective surfaces to create some unforgettably beautiful stage images. However, for all its style and unarguably potent moments, sometimes this production seemed histrionic rather than profound.

Albee’s dramaturgical craft is a great strength of Woolf. Such is its structural and verbal solidity, a conservative production featuring fine actors such as is offered by Michael Gow in Queensland, with Andrew McFarlane and Andrea Moor in the main roles, will always produce the goods.

Gow stages it on a minimalist set that exposes the machinery of the theatre, with naturalistic details sketched in on a steeply raked stage. The effect is interestingly pictorial, with the skewed perspectives reflecting the distorted relationships in the play.

In Scott Johnson, Gow’s production probably has the strongest Nick, who is the weakest role in the other shows. As the clean-cut biology professor who proves himself as hypocritically venal as George claims he is, Johnson is the only actor with the requisite air of veiled physical aggression.

What Gow’s production lacks, and the other two possess, is directorial flair. Certain scenes – Honey’s interpretative dance, for instance, or crucial moments between Martha and George – seem comparatively truncated, even perfunctory. It’s a production that dutifully serves the play, without quite hitting you between the eyes.

In the end, the George and Martha who stick with me are Garry McDonald and Wendy Hughes in Peter Evans’ MTC production. In Alison Bell, the MTC also featured the best performance in the role of Honey, despite some heavy competition from Robin McLeavy in Sydney.

In both productions, Honey’s drunken dance was a comic highlight, with McLeavy driving her interpretation to a perverse performance of sexualised violence. But Bell’s scream of anguish when George pitilessly skewered her in his cruel game of “Get The Guests” hit the direct nerve of genuine distress.

Such moments make me suspect that, despite its apparent conservatism – a comically heightened ‘60s design and American accents – Evans’ production might be the most slyly daring of all three.

McDonald is an unexpected George, but in his viciously tender disillusion, he gives the most raw portrayal. With Wendy Hughes as a pyrotechnically drunk and vulnerable Martha, the stink of mortality was palpable. They made the least glamorous pairing, and were also, from the opening lines, the most brutally funny.

This was the production that, as George says in the play, splintered through the bone to the marrow. It was painful from the very beginning, and by the end it laid bare the aching hollow inside the social façade.

It was the only production that wholly attained the devastation of the play’s final moment, when George and Martha clasp each other desperately against their loneliness, turning to face an empty and uncertain dawn.

And at the end of my quest, I think I’ve found the answer to the mystery of our affair with Albee. It’s as simple – and as complex – as love and pain.

You can’t have one without the other. That’s Albee’s unpalatable and liberating truth. And as long as human beings are around in all their gloriously contradictory messiness, that truth is always going to strike us where it hurts.

TN's review of the MTC production

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, directed by Peter Evans. Design by Christina Smith, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Ben Grant. With Alison Bell, Wendy Hughes, Garry McDonald and Stephen Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centreu, ntil October 6. Bookings: 1300 136 166.

Edward Albee’s savage lullabye Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reminds you that the Elizabethans enjoyed their theatre in the interludes between bear-baiting. Four decades after it was first staged, it remains an inimitable piece of theatrical bloodsport.

It is also one of the most disturbing love stories ever written: Martha and George give vivid life to the old saw that hatred is the other face of love. Their dysfunctional marriage is – quite literally – a performance that brings to the surface the demons that seethe beneath the conventions of middle-class career and marriage. And they prove that nothing is funnier than cruelty.

From the moment the play opens, we know it’s a fight to the death. It is 2am, and failed history academic George (Garry McDonald) and his wife Martha (Wendy Hughes) are returning home after a boozy evening at the faculty. Martha has invited the new couple in town, blond wunderkind Nick (Stephen Phillips) and his daffy wife Honey (Alison Bell) over for a nightcap.

What follows is a nightmare few hours of social evisceration. Albee’s script is an elegant machine that pitilessly peels open the ugliness of inter-generational and sexual warfare. As copious slugs of alcohol make them progressively more legless, the naïve young couple turn out to be not so naïve, after all: in the end, they are less innocent than their hosts.

Honey and Nick’s relationship, at first glance an untainted thing compared to the alcohol-soaked boxing match that seems to constitute their hosts’ marriage, is at once more and less than it seems. Nick is as unprincipled in his ambition and greed as George claims he is, and Honey is neurotically unhappy, concealing even from herself her knowledge that her marriage is loveless.

Finally George and Martha are left alone to face the abyss that remains once illusion is destroyed, their lives poised on a fulcrum between terror and hope. Nick and Honey, on the other hand, will not admit their inner emptiness. Towards the end of the play, in one of its most quietly cutting lines, Honey tells her husband: “I don’t remember anything. And you don’t remember anything, either.”

Director Peter Evans gives us the play, like Martha’s alcohol, straight. It’s an honest reading that leaves it in its time and place, complete with American accents. His production discreetly foregrounds the artifice of apparent naturalism: the performances are big, taking full advantage of the inherent theatricality of Albee’s writing, and they're viciously funny. Three and a half hours whizz past.

There were trivial things that caught like burrs in my perceptions as I watched the show. I sometimes felt that Matt Scott’s lighting design was a tad obvious, bringing the lights down on “important” moments, rather like the camera in a current affairs show zooming in for a voyeuristic close-up at the critical moment of grief. And the sound design, spartan as it is, sometimes seemed similarly unsubtle.

Christina Smith’s design is intriguing. I spent half the play hating the set, and half the play liking it; rather like its major characters, I guess. An uncomfortable compromise between abstraction and naturalism, it’s a semi-circular stage in front of a flat of empty bookshelves done out in a ugly natural woodgrain, with a pair of antlers sticking out aggressively on the right. Yet often my discomfort with its ugliness felt wholly appropriate. It’s an ugly story, after all, and the design offers no assuaging escapism.

The set does have the paramount virtue of unobstrusively and intimately framing some superb performances: and the performances are the heart of this play. Wendy Hughes’s brassy Martha emerges from a ferocious disillusionment and despair. She is perhaps more tragic than Elizabeth Taylor’s famous performance in the film, because she lacks Taylor’s louche sexiness; it throws a darker shadow over her seduction of Nick, and his later impotence. And Phillips gives a complex and subtle portrayal of Nick that only lacks a little aggression and edge.

Garry McDonald's bravura performance of George – embittered, disillusioned, humiliated and vicious – finds the tenderness that lurks inside George’s cruelty without crossing the line into sentimentality. And Alison Bell’s portrayal of Honey is brilliant: in her hands, the car accident that is Honey is no minor role, but a tragic journey into anaesthesia.

My only real complaint is how Melbourne audiences begin to clap the very instant the stage goes dark at the end of the play. What I wanted, after the last scene’s final devastating admission, was a breath of silence in which those lines could resonate, ripening to their full meaning. But there’s nothing the MTC can do about that.

A shorter version of this review appears in today's Australian. Link if and when it appears.

Chris Goode, of the admirable Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, once made a distinction between those who are playwrights and those who write for the theatre. It struck me as an interesting distinction between different kinds of practice, the question revolving around the question of theatrical collaboration: a playwright offering his deathless prose for theatrical minions to interpret and "serve", the theatre writer as a glowing member of the ensemble. Most playwrights are somewhere in between these extremes, but Edward Albee is most unambiguously a playwright (no, a Playwright) and has lit much blogospherical heat by describing those who impede the writer's vision as "the forces of darkness". Catch up with the debate at Superfluities, Parabasis, and the Guardian.

UPDATE: Mr Goode himself steps into the fray with a long and fascinating rumination in which he expands on his distinction between playwright and theatre writer, and suggests why "old-guard playwrights" might be feeling defensive. Pin your ears back and drink it in; I think he hits a lot of nails bang in the middle, especially when he talks about a necessary violence to the text that is part of making theatre. As here: "The director's fidelity is to the demands of theatre, not to the demands of the playwright; indeed, once the director has the text in her hands, there is no playwright. There is only theatre. The playwright in the rehearsal room is utterly and irretrievably fallacious." I know playwrights who completely agree with this. Oh, wait, they're probably theatre writers. Things I'd argue with too, but I should be writing, and not about theatre.