Oxford Playhouse brings its new production of Edward Albee’s masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the stage this week. Ahead of opening night, we spoke to Ben Hall who plays Nick in this searing drama. For tickets and listing, please visit here.
Nick enters the play as an observer—when did he begin to realise he was becoming complicit in the night’s games?
In some ways, I think Nick spends quite a lot of the play as an observer, and it’s actually quite late that he really becomes involved in the psychological games of his hosts, Martha and George. He makes a very strong choice in Act 2, and I think that is the turning point where he realises that he is complicit in the problem and ultimately pays for it.
Before then, I think he tries to beat their games, and he doesn’t really want to play. He feels like he’s better than anything they’re playing and tries to distance himself from it – until a point where he just can’t anymore.
How did you approach playing Nick’s ambition without reducing him to a simple villain or opportunist?
For me, the most important thing was how to make him as three-dimensional and human as possible. To do that, I had to take it a step at a time – I couldn’t really look at him as a whole; I had to look at him by his choices.
And so, I’m not entirely sure what I’ve come up with, but I hope the audience will be able to decide whether he’s absolutely awful or somewhat human… My hope is that he’s seen as a three-dimensional person who makes very, very bad decisions and pays for them.
How do the power dynamics that Nick navigates shift throughout the play?
In terms of the power dynamics, it’s not that he’s lost for most of the play, but he is trying really hard to figure out what the hell is going on and not quite being able to manage it. Perhaps because his brain doesn’t quite work the same as Martha and George’s do.
Martha and George tend to use metaphor, simile, imagery, and this beautiful language. Nick is a very precise and specific person; he doesn’t really exist in their world. I think he navigates that throughout the whole play, and he’s constantly floored by them. His whole thing is that he’s incessantly trying to pretend it doesn’t affect him, and to try and be better than them, and to take his power back, which Martha and George just do not let him have.
How does performing opposite such psychologically exposed characters change the way you pace and hold back a performance?
For me, it’s sort of a gut instinct. You sense the rhythm and the pace of the play, and marry what you, as the actor and the character needs, and where they need to get to. You then have to match that with the energy of the play and the rhythmic nature of the language. Ultimately, you just have to trust that it’s correct, really.
Nick presents control and confidence on the surface—what fractures underneath were most important for you to reveal?
I think there were two, really. There’s Nick’s personal mask that fractures, and then there’s the public mask of the ideal marriage that fractures.
So, in terms of Nick personally – I think this veneer of arrogance and being sure of himself is a mask. Slowly throughout the play, he becomes unsettled enough that he starts revealing that actually he doesn’t know everything, and he’s quick to anger and frustration.
That then leads into the public mask of his marriage and this idea of white picket fence America, and cracks start to show along with that. Through that, I’ve tried to make him as human as possible, even though he makes two terrible mistakes: one which is intellectual, where he believes that George is someone that he’s not and wouldn’t be capable of being, and then secondly, physically, he makes a choice that betrays his marriage.
Cracks are definitely revealed in terms of him as a human being and as the mask of the perfect American gentleman.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens at Oxford Playhouse this Friday and will run until Saturday 7 March. For tickets, visit oxfordplayhouse.com