#67 ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’
Booze, Bile, and the Theater of Marital Evisceration
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) is a beautifully lit knife fight disguised as a cocktail party. It’s Edward Albee’s war-of-words stage play brought to vicious, bristling life on screen, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton weaponizing every line of dialogue like it’s tipped with arsenic. It’s a film about marriage, truth, illusion, and the long, slow psychic cannibalism that happens when two people mistake emotional destruction for intimacy. Also, there’s yelling. So much yelling.
Taylor plays Martha, the university president’s daughter and the patron saint of angry women forced to smile through decades of academic mansplaining. She’s loud, sexual, brilliant, and angry—a combination that makes the film treat her as dangerous, as if female fury is more transgressive than male violence. Burton is George, her withering, self-loathing husband, who matches her insult for insult, hiding his sadism behind a tattered tweed suit and enough internalized resentment to level a small liberal arts college.
Together, they drag a younger couple—Nick and Honey, played with pitch-perfect discomfort by George Segal and Sandy Dennis—into their private hellscape under the guise of post-party drinks. What follows is a psychological demolition derby: secrets exposed, illusions shattered, social norms gutted and left twitching on the shag carpet. The entire film is one long dare: how much emotional damage can you stomach before someone breaks character?
And yet, despite its brilliance, Virginia Woolf is still a deeply gendered chamber of horrors. George gets to be complex. His bitterness is academic, his cruelty philosophical. Martha? She’s hysterical, monstrous, a cautionary tale about what happens when a woman dares to age and outtalk her husband. Her sexuality is played as grotesque, her desire for truth framed as instability. She’s punished for needing, punished for knowing, punished for being too much.
The film strips its characters of every social pretense, but it never quite lets Martha escape the trap of being “the shrew.” Taylor delivers a volcanic performance—raw, ugly, and brilliant—but the narrative still demands she be broken by the end, reduced to weeping vulnerability while George gets to sip his bourbon and bask in the aftermath of emotional napalm.
Mike Nichols’ direction is unflinching and intimate, and Haskell Wexler’s cinematography turns every grimace and glare into gothic poetry. It’s theater, yes, but it’s also emotional voyeurism—the kind of film where the camera stays just long enough to make you feel complicit.
4 out of 5 broken illusions
(One for Taylor’s fury. One for Burton’s corrosive charm. One for Nichols’ claustrophobic direction. One for Albee’s dialogue, which cuts cleaner than any blade. The missing star? Lost in the rubble of Martha’s psyche—because in this world, even the strongest women must be shattered to be seen as human.)
