Who's Afraid?
An elderly acting couple take stock of their love for each other and for their profession. All their productions are flops except one: a popular repertory classic about a pair of swearing and hard-drinking intellectuals that brings in money and audiences. They are sick of performing it, but fated to stand there night after night in those same old roles.
A vibrant linguistic festival.Theaterkrant
Only the actors playing opposite them change regularly, two young people who inevitably leave in high dudgeon after a while. It gets harder and harder to find replacements. But then the state comes to their aid. The next pair of young actors will receive a socio-cultural subsidy on condition that they have foreign origins and preferably non-white skin. The first encounter between the foursome brings all their repressed conflicts to the fore.
Confrontational and gutsy.NRC Handelsblad
As a brilliant intertext of Edward Albee’s classic ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’, this work by Tom Lanoye is a head-on collision between four characters who never shrink from ranting and raging, or from manipulating each other. Beneath their comic layer of fulmination and pretence, one truth remains: they are condemned to each other, and to the theatre.
Splendid play, with a high joke-density and priceless sentences, full of play on words and figures of speech.De Standaard
Tom Lanoye turns “Who’s Afraid” inside out to create a ferociously good performance.De Volkskrant
