Guardian - 09/05/01 - Michael Billington

...it shows the mutinous Jack coming home to Gillian, his wife of thirty years standing, and peremptorily announcing he is leaving her: in fact, he re-enters several times to repeat the statement.

...What follows is a marital duel in which old wounds are reopened, ancient infidelities resurrected and blows and punches freely exchanged: like Strindberg, Albee suggests marriage is a war zone in which there are no victors but simply mutually exhausted combatants. What is specific to Albee is the play's literary allusiveness and exuberant melancholia. Like George and Martha in Virginia Woolf, Jack and Gillian are an educated couple who can fell each other with a quotation. Sombre yet vituperatively energetic, the play gets matchingly ferocious performances from Bill Paterson and Sheila Gish as two marital heavy-weights fighting each other to a standstill...this play has hints of Albee's quondam power...

...Page's atmospheric production...


Independent - 09/05/01 - Paul Taylor

The director Anthony Page here juxtaposes two short dramas that weren't written as a pair: Marriage Play dates from 1987, Finding the Sun from 1983...Performed back-to-back they make a tart diptych on the isolation at the heart of intimacy.

Given a British makeover and transplanted to Richmond, the spat in Marriage Play benefits greatly from the vehement, half-laughable passion of Bill Paterson's Jack which is a perfect foil to the mocking skittishness and moments of sudden bleak insight produced by Sheila Gish's excellent Gillian. The play has some broad fun with the wife's Leporello-like diary, which describes every act of marital intercourse, and moves towards a plausible stalemate ending where the Lawrentian ideal of a marriage creating two strong individuals rather than a fudge fusion appears to be desolately travestied in the yoked solitudes.

Evening Standard - 09/05/01 - Nicholas de Jongh

You rarely see a middle-aged middle-class couple engage in vicious fisticuffs on stage, with one female foot lashing out at a man where it hurts most. After all such people usually have more subtle and satisfying ways of hurting each other at length. But Sheila Gish and Bill Paterson, as the couple concerned went at each other with all the relish of veteran brawlers last night. Marriage Play, the first half of this magnificently disturbing double bill by Edward Albee, fixes a rare discerning eye on the peculiar games and subterfuges played by people whose lives are wasted or ruined.

Marriage Play, written when Albee was out of fashion in the Eighties, is a chilling comic variation on the marriage-game themes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in which George and Martha clung to illusion and fantasy to ward off painful hometruths about themselves. Here the isolated warring couple, Gillian and Jack, like George and Martha before them, play ritual games to express and contain their sense of life-disappointment.

...Gillian and Jack do not fight such a coruscating duel of words as the vicious squabblers in Virginia Woof, but there's no mistaking the force of their reproaches and recriminations or a residual, mutual tenderness in Anthony Page's beautifully animated production. Miss Gish is terrific as a mellow sex symbol, basking in the warmth of her own aura. Flicking nonchalantly through an aide memoire that details her husband's bedroom erotic feats and failures, she counters Paterson's powerfully expressed despair with scathing, sulky hauteur.

Telegraph - 10/05/01 - Charles Spencer

Paterson and Gish give terrific performances. Gish combines wry intelligence with raddled glamour to bring out the deep hurt beneath her character's witty manner: she is a woman who keeps talking to stop herself from screaming. Paterson captures all the seething frustration and fury of a man who realises that his time is running out, and that all lives must in any case end in failure...

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