A Delicate Balance

WED 20 - SAT 30 SEPT

Main House

Edward Albee

Director: Sue Moore

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Which is Edward Albee’s best play? I’d plump for this one…. it touches on something profound: the secret terror that lurks beneath the bland routines of bourgeois life. Michael Billington, The Guardian

Urban socialites Agnes and Tobias appear to inhabit a glamorous world of drinks parties and social clubs. The return home of their recently divorced daughter, the constant presence of Agnes’ alcoholic sister and the impromptu late-night arrival of some close friends, begin to peel away this veneer.

As their lives become increasingly claustrophobic, the characters battle with their fear of stepping into the real world, opting instead for the undemanding familiarity of their own drawing room.

Laced with acerbic wit, A Delicate Balance won Edward Albee his first Pulitzer Prize and followed the success of his breakthrough work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? One of the great American plays of the 20th Century.

Produced by special arrangement with WILLIAM MORRIS ENDEAVOR ENTERTAINMENT LLC, NEW YORK.

Running Time: 2 hours 35 minutes including intervals

Director's Notes

A DELICATE BALANCE

EDWARD ALBEE

I wasn’t expecting to direct this play; it was to be the last production directed by William Wilkinson, who sadly – and frustratingly for him – was unable to continue, due to personal reasons.

I have always liked the play and admire Edward Albee. I have seen much of his writing on stage. I first saw A Delicate Balance when I was in my 20s and have sought it out whenever it has been staged.

It plays to my feeling about theatre, which is that being in the auditorium with a cast is a special thing, where collectively you witness something which makes you think, moves you, makes you laugh or cry. I have from time to time been moved to stand at the end of a performance. Something must happen to you to make that feeling compulsory, to show you have been affected by something and immediately need to respond.

Albee wanted similarly to engage his audiences and make them think. By highlighting the empty existence of the characters in this play, he wanted people to reflect and think about how they are living their own lives. A Delicate Balance explores what happens if you settle for a life that is not fully lived; if you bury things, pretend, are in denial, live a life full of illusion, don’t face reality in case you upset your own delicate balance; the balance you have created to cope. It explores a family where the delicate balance in all of them is threatened by an unexpected and unwelcome intrusion into their lives and they need to restore the balance at all costs.

Michael Billington, who was the senior theatre critic of the Guardian and who came to the Loft for an evening of conversation on stage during our Centenary, said that if he had to choose his favourite Albee play, this would be it.

Albee wants the play to encourage people to participate in their own life fully, not to waste the chance to live every moment and be what he calls ‘fully conscious’. He didn’t want people to wake up to this too late. What wise counsel; we should all want to look back on our lives and feel that we have make best use of our talents, pursued the things that make us come alive and found fulfilment; to use our time well and to be in the moment, not filming it, posting about it, but experiencing it, fully engaged.

I hope this play makes you reflect and that you will enjoy the fun in it, the revelations of this play and the exquisite writing of an outstanding playwright. A critic of the New York Times said this play should never be touched by non professional companies, so we are daring courageously with a company who are fully conscious! Take a chance on it if you haven’t seen it – it’s that good a play.

SUE MOORE

REVIEW

Review

REVIEW OF A DELICATE BALANCE BY EDWARD ALBEE

DIRECTOR: SUE MOORE

The Loft Theatre Company offers up another example of fine acting and intelligent direction This time it is A Delicate Balance by Pulitzer prize winning author, Edward Albee. This is a story of a family and their friends, set in a middle-class suburban environment in late 1960s America. If this is the apple pie version of the American Dream, there is definitely a worm in it somewhere.

There is not much plot to speak of. Tobias (Craig Shelton) and Agnes (Lorna Middleton) live with Agnes’s alcoholic sister Claire (Leonie Frazier). It’s not a happy arrangement, but they know each other so well it would be hard to imagine them living otherwise. Claire doesn’t seem to do much except drink and make barbed remarks. Agnes is the matriarch, the fulcrum upon which the family turns, and Tobias the somewhat long-suffering husband in a house full of women. Then their daughter Julia (Leonie Slater) arrives, following the breakdown of her fourth marriage. Already we are in very fractured territory. Then their best friends Harry (Paul Curran) and Edna (Lucinda Toomey) arrive. They have been driven out of their house by some nameless fear. We never know what it is, but it is enough to make them insist they move in, like cuckoos in the nest. The rest of the play follows the breakdown and the tentative restoration of order in this little society, driven apart by conflicts of loyalty, love and friendship.

This is a play well worth seeing twice to get the full measure. The first time will impress you with the force of the acting and the tense, neurotic atmosphere of the whole thing; the second time will allow you to drill down into the language and the finer nuances between the characters.

Every player is on top form and commands the stage with their own strength of character and skill. A Delicate Balance will move you in complex ways. Hard to pull off without falling into melodrama, it is a masterpiece in which all the parts fit together in a delicate, discordant harmony.

Nick Le Mesurier – Leamington Courier

DELICATE BALANCE, EDWARD ALBEE

DIRECTOR: SUE MOORE

THE INTERWOVEN relationships and potentially volatile chemistry of a family are at play in this hefty, densely-constructed but ultimately rewarding staging of Edward Albee’s dissection of American domestic life.

Opulent, educated and fully-stocked at the bar, this should be a family at ease and in harmony, but any such veneer is, on closer inspection, fatally thin and riven with cracks. Discontent, bitterness and finger-pointing are never really that well concealed.

The return of a daughter fleeing her fourth failed marriage and the unexpected arrival of friends fleeing something which never becomes apparent, make for a full house and, once that bar’s been pressed into vigorous and unremitting service, that thin veneer all but disappears.

These are not people whose lives we can really identify with and the language is sufficiently overblown and, at times, ponderous to move them even further away from us. Nevertheless, the quandaries of family versus friends, bluff male head of the clan versus more astute supporting female, stereotype ideals versus blunt human reality – all resonate to a point
There is a full collection of finely-drawn and beautifully-timed performances from the company of six.

Lorna Middleton as the steely, controlled matriarch is perfectly at home throughout, as relaxed and unhurried in her home as her husband, played by Craig Shelton, is uncomfortable and vulnerable. The delicate balance between them, one of several underpinning Albee’s drama, tilts from side to side and even in its quieter, tranquil moments is never absolutely still or resolved.

Credit must also go to Leonie Frazier as the booze-soaked sister whose edgy, too-honest presence threatens to upset any lasting balance this odd group may at any time achieve.

Sue Moore handles the dynamics of a long but frequently sedentary weekend with an abundance of style and a pleasing sense of pacing, all very confidently staged against Richard Moore’s atmospheric design.
In a piece where the difficult decisions which are made are of far less importance than the process by which they are reached, the feeling is constantly that something has to give. But even when the far-from-welcome guests unilaterally opt to make things easier by simply leaving, there’s no let-up in the family’s prevaricating and destructive soul-searching.

The morning’s tentative sunshine and uneasy peace is a fitting metaphor for the whole; is the fragile resolution really worth the journey? It’s the tension, not the release, in this intriguing production which will stay with us.

Matthew Salisbury – Leamington Observer

CAST & CREATIVES