The last time I left the Playhouse feeling this tense, it was after watching The Woman in Black. It’s testament to the cumulative talents of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s production that its three hour runtime goes by in the blink of an eye, much like the time lapse that comes with spending an evening too in your cups; suddenly it’s 4am, the dawn chorus is ringing in your ears, and you’re grimly surveying the damage of the night before, wondering how you’re going to clean up your mess.

Edward Albee’s artfully acid rebuke to the facade of domestic bliss and happy families was performed at the Playhouse twenty years ago, but its connections to the play also run deep in its associations with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, arguably the most famous pair to play disaffected academic couple George and Martha. It feels auspicious then for the play to receive an entirely self-produced homecoming that can stand up to some of the play’s most well-known portrayals.

Let’s start with our doomed quartet; George and Martha (Matthew Pidgeon and Katy Stephens) and Nick and Honey (Ben Hall and Leah Haile). This is a phenomenal ensemble. Katy Stephens as Martha is so horribly, glamorously compelling, beginning the night with the barbed wit and self-assured sensuality of Joan Collins in Dynasty and ending it with the tragic, self-imposed isolation and misery of Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Stephens is extraordinary, striking the tricky balance of defiant and pathetic, worldly and childlike. Her emergence amid the crowd in the third act is a fabulous jumpscare that also gives the audience a queasy feeling of complicity.

Pidgeon as George is perhaps not as initially refined or composed as previous iterations of the character have been, but I think this adds a different flavour of threat. To cite a comparison that might sound bizarre, in the video game Resident Evil VII, Jack Baker, the patriarch of a cursed family in a crumbling house, is incapable of dying due to the influence of a supernatural rot. This is something his character takes a perverse glee in - no matter how many times you put a bullet in him, no matter how many of his limbs you sever, he’ll simply laugh it off before coming at you with an axe. He even, at one point, shoots himself in the head to prove to you his own imperviousness. I’ve always maintained that Who’s Afraid is in many respects a domestic horror, and I see in Pidgeon’s George that same grim delight in the chase, revelling in your discomfort. He knows that whatever you throw at him, he’ll hit back with something stronger, be it a drink or a fist. And he and Martha together are fabulous. Their practised theatricality and phasing between accents is like being held captive at the world’s most sociopathic improv show (which, in a sense, it is), but there are moments where you catch a glimpse of the spark that brought them together, even if that spark now seeks to reduce everything around it to ashes.

Nick and Honey act as both mirror and foil to George and Martha’s antics; Honey’s hysterical pregnancy and the pair’s mysteriously absent son, Nick’s bottled attempts to ‘get ahead’ with Martha echoing George’s similar impotence among the faculty staff. Hall and Haile capture their slow corruption at their hosts’ hands with both humour and grim pathos, Nick’s politeness and Honey’s doe-eyed innocence giving way to moral (and literal) sickness. In these four, Albee presents a perverted, incestuous vision of the nuclear household - note how the young couple are referred to as ‘baby’ and ‘children’, even during Martha’s sexual advances - and each does justice to the feeling of being one big, messed-up family.

The set design of George and Martha’s home is the perfect pot in which to slowly boil these frogs. Faintly classical in its open plan, flat arches decked with curtains, it calls to mind not just a theatre, in line with George and Martha’s weaponised artifice, but a coliseum, leading you to wonder what new challenge Nick and Honey will have to contend with next. In line with George’s Latin invocations and the bemoaning of life in ‘New Carthage’, it also hints at an empire crumbling; a lovely costume detail is George’s jacket, almost the exact shade of tan as the walls, as he slowly becomes part of the collegiate furniture. In the beginning of the third act, as an abandoned Martha turns back towards the closed curtain, it opens ever so slightly, like an hungry, inevitable mouth, subtle but chillingly effective.

This is a claustrophobic and intense watch. During the first act I overheard an audience member say “I wonder how much darker it’s going to get.” The first act is a July afternoon compared to the third. But if you’re looking for a beautifully excruciating evening of theatre, one that will make you cackle while putting your soul through the wringer, you simply must join George and Martha for a nightcap.