A Delicate Balance
By Edward Albee
Sydney Theatre Company
Opera House Drama Theatre
By Mark Stoyich
Edward Albee became one of the US's most famous postwar playwrights almost entirely on the basis of one play; but what a play! Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? did for quarrelling married couples what Shakespeare did for indecisive princes.
This play is much less well known, and certainly lacks the energy of Who's Afraid?, but it covers the same terrain of frigid, US east-coast Protestant-dom.
Agnes and Tobias are middle aged, well off and very establishment. The burdens in Agnes' highly controlled world are her alcoholic sister and Agnes and Tobias' four-times-divorced daughter.
Sister Claire does drink a lot but, these being upper-middle-class Protestants, so does everyone — from morn till night — without ever eating. There seems to be a bar behind every distasteful gilt-framed painting in their mock-English-gentry drawing room.
Daughter Julia, seeking refuge from yet another failed marriage, not only drinks but marries the wrong men — and blames her parents. Husband Tobias is quiescent, but there's a story of adultery hovering in the background, and also a dead son — enough plot devices for a month of soap opera, but they're left undeveloped.
This is Edward Albee-land, so there must be nameless dread of another, more metaphysical kind. This enters Agnes and Tobias' drawing room in the form of their best friends, Harry and Edna, identically well off, establishment and in control, but forced to flee their home by an unnamed terror.
The first-night audience, probably well oiled, laughed heartily during the first part of this production, perhaps in the belief that they were watching a sort of British sit-com. The laughter became uneasier and then died as the play went darkly into ideas about home and refuge, and what it is to be a friend, or family.
Julia is furious that her safe haven, her childhood room, has been given to Harry and Edna. She wants them out. Edna coolly explains that, as family friends, they have rights. The play's central concern becomes, should Agnes and Tobias allow their old friends to stay, even though they may be "infected" by the terror?
As a gay boy growing up in suburban, middle-class WASP-dom, Albee became acutely aware of the sinister aspects of his tribe: their emphasis on control; their obsession with "privacy" and appearing "normal" to others; their avoidance of talking about problems, which they cover over with drink or banter; the uneasy relationship between women and men; the men's pride and insecurity in their masculinity, the women quietly dominating; and the almost obsessive secrecy within the family unit, which leads to regarding all outsiders as intruders, so that real friendships become impossible.
These characteristics are true in all Anglo-Saxon societies, but especially so in the US, which is a society, as Claire observes, "but not a communal one — giving but not sharing, outgoing but not friendly".
A Delicate Balance is a pretty good play, but it is dated — that's why the '90s audience laughed. The theme of the safe refuge being threatened by an intruder was dealt with in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, as was the nameless dread — a product of the bomb and rising social tensions.
Albee wrote it in 1966, when the US was on the brink of being blown apart by the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution. No doubt, the people he portrays still exist, but they are changed by 30 years of ceaseless upheaval and increasingly honest talk about sex and society.
Agnes and Tobias, Harry and Edna, grew up in the prewar period, and they're mourning the loss of that world. That's why I think it a mistake to set this play in the present. It has some timeless aspects, but it's still of its time. It is good, but not great, and I wonder why the Sydney Theatre Company chose to revive it.