Gillian Anderson is to return to the West End in a role she has coveted “for decades”. The Sex Education star will appear opposite Billy Crudup in a revival of Edward Albee’s marital meltdown classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the autumn. Staged in-the-round, the production will be directed by Marianne Elliott at the intimate @sohoplace theatre.
Anderson will play Martha who spars with her professor husband George over drinks with a young married couple in the 1962 play. “Martha’s rage is inseparable from her longing, her disappointment and her need to be seen – all things still eminently relatable 60 years on,” said Anderson. The role was first played on Broadway by Uta Hagen, on screen a few years later by Elizabeth Taylor (opposite her husband Richard Burton) and in a 1996 London revival by Diana Rigg. “I’ve wanted to play Martha for decades,” said Anderson. “I’m thrilled Billy Crudup is joining me in the ring as George.”
Crudup is becoming a London theatre regular. The star of The Morning Show made his West End theatre debut in 2024 portraying 19 characters in a solo show, Harry Clarke. He returned for a musical version of the western High Noon which closed earlier this month. Anderson’s London theatre roles have included Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a sensation at the Young Vic theatre in 2014, and Broadway star Margo Channing in All About Eve, based on the Hollywood classic, in 2019.
Elliott, whose upcoming projects include directing Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George at the Barbican next summer, said: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play of astonishing emotional precision – brutal, witty and deeply human.”
Designed by Miriam Buether, the show will be produced by Nica Burns, the owner of @sohoplace, and by Sonia Friedman Productions. Burns described it as “the first American classic” to be presented at the new theatre, which opened in 2022. For Friedman, it is “one of the defining plays of the modern theatre – raw, ferociously funny and devastating in equal measure”.
The play, which will also star Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn, runs from 21 September to 19 December.