I have never come out of a play so depressed. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but it certainly wasn’t the fault of a good production of a difficult play.

Edward Albee’s half satire, half melodrama of bourgeois life in a University town promised to hit the right note for an embittered second year happy to see figures not unlike his supervisors suffering uncharacteristic bouts of maniacal sexual deviancy. Add to that a dependency upon alcohol that made the biggest tossers of your college drinking society look like Puritans, and the evening promised to be a feast of transferable schadenfreud. By the end, however, I fled the ADC in desperate need of a drink and a suitcase full of Benson and Hedges.

The play revolves around a series of revelations about Martha and George’s married life which does more than just scratch away the veneer of middle class respectability, but actually rips up the fucking floorboards. We soon learn that their guests, fresh faced newly-weds from way out West, are far from perfect either. The plaudits must go to Elizabeth Donnelly, who was horny, desperate and magnificent as Martha, middle aged wife of Ed Rowett’s bumbling George, the professor who hides his cruel insinuations behind Latin proverbs and feigned deafness.

Martha and George’s intrigues are largely illusory, but, as the program notes ask, “are they really having fun?” Despite Rowett’s excellent one liners and Donnelly’s burlesqued sluttiness, the answer seems to be that they weren’t. Too often the outrageous stories, such as the time Martha punched George ‘accidentally,’ were told as if the actors were fully aware of the pain they were causing each other, and not with a sense of disregard. The emotional torment that they were inflicting upon each other wasn’t really balanced by the idea that they were playing a game, which meant that, with each shocking revelation, we were offered no comic escape from the overwhelming bleakness of murderous impulse and Oedipal desire.

Robyn Hoedamaker’s production captured a sense of the tragedy of two middle aged lives wasted, and the impending horror of marriage that seems the inevitable fate of their young guests. But maybe I was wrong to be so depressed – as the play ends George and Martha hold each other and sing. By Pascal Porcheron