A Delicate Balance – review

Which is Edward Albee's best play? I'd plump for this one. Written in 1966, it may not have the emotional extravagance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but it has a greater tonal range, and touches on something profound: the secret terror that lurks beneath the bland routines of bourgeois life.

Imagine Eliot's The Family Reunion crossed with Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner and you get the picture. Tobias and Agnes, well-heeled denizens of American suburbia, suddenly find their best friends, Harry and Edna, turning up at their door and seeking sanctuary from their own domestic demons. The result is not just a spiritual and social challenge to the hosts, who have learned how to cope with their serially divorced daughter, Julia, and Agnes's alcoholic sister, Claire; it also becomes a comment on the gregarious isolation of the US itself. As Claire says, "We're not a communal nation ... giving but not sharing, outgoing but not friendly."

The difficulty lies in maintaining the delicate balance between the characters, which James Macdonald's near-flawless production does far better than the last West End revival. Penelope Wilton's Agnes is a perfect portrait of a woman who keeps panic at bay through a gift for Jamesian periphrasis, a whiplash wit and a carefully preserved social decorum: "We were just having a cordial," she hilariously announces as the best friends arrive in a booze-sodden room. Tim Pigott-Smith has done nothing finer than his Tobias, who moves from cardiganed ineffectualness to an almost desperate need for sacrifice and pain. Imelda Staunton also plays the heavy-drinking Claire not as some show-stealing role but as a woman determined to drown her own private fears, and there is exemplary support from Lucy Cohu as the infantile divorcee and Ian McElhinney and Diana Hardcastle as the intrusive friends. Guy Hoare's lighting, which bathes the final act in a memorably ironic sunshine glow, puts the cap on a brilliant evening.