Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Real-life couple Kat Stewart and David Whiteley explores marital discord

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a famously tough play. It’s tough on the audience and it’s tough on the performers.

Edward Albee first staged it in 1962 and in the decades since, it’s been mounted all over the world, and famously as a film by Mike Nichols starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Taylor and Burton were on their first stint as a married couple, and the film has played a supporting role in the continuing mythos surrounding their tempestuous relationship(s). While they didn’t split until eight years later, there’s something of a cautionary tale that hangs over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Given the thorny dynamics of Martha and George, the fictional middle-aged couple engaged in mind games and power plays over the story’s three acts, you’d have to be pretty confident in your relationship if you decide to, with your spouse, take on the roles.

This is one situation in which you don’t want the lines between drama and reality to blur.

Kat Stewart and David Whiteley met while working together at Melbourne’s Red Stitch Actors Theatre and married in 2008. Doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a reunion and a homecoming.

The production, directed by Sarah Goodes, was first staged at Red Stitch in 2023 and is now playing at the Sydney Theatre Company. It was also the first time they had been on stage together since their first child was born in 2012.

“We plugged back into that shorthand that we developed over 20 years ago, which is a real kick for me,” Stewart told The Nightly. “And I love being able to see Dave fly as George, because I think he’s perfect casting.”

The two thespians crackle with electric charge on stage as they trade barbs as easily as they trade smiles, and there’s a real kineticism that keeps its running time on pace so you never feel the length of its three hours.

Nichols took a lot of the comedy out of his film version, but the play is darkly funny as the four characters - also a younger couple, Nick (Harvey Zielinksi) and Honey (Emily Goddard) - slowly and then quickly disintegrate over ill-conceived late-night cocktails and withering confessions.

When they started rehearsals in 2023, Stewart and Whiteley were cognisant of the emotional toll of the might of the production, but also of playing these specific characters and their dynamics. They had some “rituals” to make sure they would reconnect as themselves.

“Sounds a little witchy,” Stewart said, laughing. “It was witchy.”

Whiteley jumped in, “witchy in a good way”. He continued, “we just made sure that we looked after each other between rehearsals and in those opening weeks”.

Two years and three versions of the production later (it also played at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 2024), they’ve eased into a pattern that now, the first thing they say to each other at the end of a marathon show is, according to Whiteley, “shall I get the Uber or you?”.

Stewart added, “we’re pretty spent by the end of it, and we debrief in the car on the way home and start again.

“But I don’t ever want to get too blasé about it, we still need to be kind to each other. I was a bit scratchy yesterday, and a bit tired, and Dave had to be particularly nice to me.”

The role of Martha is iconic in contemporary theatre, and it’s one that Stewart has always been fascinated by.

“Like Blanche in Streetcar or Lady (Macbeth), she’s just one of those towering characters in our canon, and I’m the right age,” she said. “Someone who’s able to channel the rage and the disappointment and the heartbreak of middle age.

“That’s not to say that’s my experience, but I understand it at this age in a way that I couldn’t possibly have when I read the play as a teenager. The way that Albee has captured that, and he was in his 30s when he wrote this, blows my mind, how perceptive and mercurial it was.”

Whiteley jumped on board because Stewart wanted to do the production, and he had assumed that like Nichols’ film, George was a supporting presence.

“Then when we started working on it, I realised what a massive character it was and how much George drives this drama,” he recalled.

Whiteley too understood that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf can be a difficult play to sit through, but the key was in how Goodes brought out the comedy and facilitated whip-fast transitions from farce to tragedy in a blink.

Those heavier aspects – marital discord, broken trust, contemporary anxieties of the 1960s – still resonate more than six decades later.

“I take a weak kind of comfort in this play,” Stewart said. “I find it comforting that generations before us have always worried. This cohort were worried about test tube babies and genetic modifications. We’re worried about AI and a lot of other stuff as well.

“Albee was always worried about America heading towards fascism, he was talking about it for a long, long time. I feel less alone knowing that the generations before us - good, smart people - have wrestled with all the same anxieties. They’ve evolved, but essentially, I feel like we’re the same.”

Unlike Taylor and Burton’s fate, Stewart and Whiteley seems to have taken something very different from their experiences embodying Martha and George. A renewed appreciation.

“I’m so busy with my own work that when you see the reactions of the critics and the audience to Kat’s performance, I’m just reminded of how extraordinary she is as a performer and as an interpreter because it’s not an easy role,” Whiteley said. “Martha is the marquee role and there’s a lot of pressure on you.”

Of her scene and life partner, Stewart was equally effusive. “George is the assassin and it’s the great sleight of hand with that character and with (Whiteley’s) performance that you think he’s one thing and he’s actually running the show.

“I’ve always known Dave was a fantastic actor, I couldn’t be with someone I didn’t think was a great actor. That was the draw in the first place.

“It’s been great to be able to play together again, doing all this, that’s been a real kick just to be colleagues as well as partners and parents.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is playing at the Sydney Theatre Company until December 14