Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup spar in Virginia Woolf revival

Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup are starring in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at @sohoplace in London, in a new production directed by Marianne Elliott.

The pairing answers any complaint about celebrity casting in the West End before it can be made. Both Anderson and Crudup began their careers on stage, and both hold their own in Albee's conflagration of a play about unhappy marriage and its necessary illusions — a work immortalised on screen by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

The play's central couple is George, a middle-aged history professor with a sagging academic libido, and Martha, his frustrated, ceaselessly needling wife. Anderson and Crudup are confident performers, and it makes sense, the review notes, that this 1962 American classic about conjugal warfare is taken on by two Americans — albeit under the aegis of British directorial powerhouse Marianne Elliott.

Elliott's previous production, Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, drew criticism from some quarters for an anaemic connection between its leading lovers. There is no such shortage of sparks here: the central couple shout and joust throughout, delivering no end of sparring.

Yet the production has a flaw of temperature. For rather too long, the combat between Anderson and Crudup does not feel dangerous or emotionally eviscerating enough. The comedy, the review suggests, carries an air of George and Mildred — a sitcom familiarity that blunts the play's capacity to wound.

Burton and Taylor's landmark screen adaptation remains the benchmark against which any new staging is measured. Anderson and Crudup can stand comparison with it. Whether Elliott's production builds from verbal sparring to genuine devastation will determine how this revival is judged alongside Albee's fiercest interpreters.