The couple risking it all to perform a portrait of marital hell

Portraits of marital hell don’t come much more brutal than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, so you might imagine the last thing a pair of married actors would want to do is risk their own relationship by taking it on.

But, boldly throwing caution to the wind, that’s precisely what Kat Stewart and David Whiteley are doing as the revival of Edward Albee’s 1962 play moves from the tiny 80-seat Red Stitch Theatre in St Kilda to the 800-seat Comedy Theatre next month, thus becoming the first production in the company’s 23-year history to make the giant leap to the commercial main stage.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Stewart of the chance to work with her husband for the first time since 2007.

“It’s a rare gift,” Whiteley agrees. “We didn’t think we’d get the chance ever again.”

The pair met at Red Stitch in 2002, when Whiteley – a founding member of the company – auditioned the young marketing graduate turned aspiring actress.

“They very strategically got me in because then they’d have a publicist,” she jokes. “When I joined there were 12 actors, and we all did everything. We cleaned the toilets and put the posters up in the front of house. Whenever I did a show I got another actor to do the publicity because it would have been weird otherwise.”

They’ve been together since 2004, and have two children, aged eight and 12. But as Stewart’s TV work took off – she won an AFI award and a Logie for her turn as Roberta Williams in the original Underbelly (2008), and was one of the stars of long-running series Offspring and Five Bedrooms – their professional lives diverged. She last performed with Red Stitch in 2010, though she has frequently been back on stage since with the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Whiteley, meanwhile, has been a mainstay of Red Stitch, which continues to foster new writing, give opportunities to emerging actors and directors, and produce challenging theatre for a loyal audience.

What it hasn’t done before is take one if its micro-productions to a major commercial venue (though a couple of shows have enjoyed brief runs at the Arts Centre).

The idea of staging one of the classics of 20th-century American theatre was born out of a desire to mark the company’s coming of age. “This is not a play Red Stitch would usually have done,” says Stewart. “It was the 21st anniversary, and we were having a drink at the party and being nostalgic about old times, and I said, ‘I’d love to come back someday.’ And [artistic director] Ella [Caldwell] said, ‘I’d love you to come back. What if we did something special?’ So doing a classic was something quite different.”

For director Sarah Goodes, who oversaw the production mounted on the “postage stamp-sized stage” at the company’s St Kilda home and is also helming its transition to the wide-open space of the Comedy, the idea of pairing Stewart – with whom she had worked at the Melbourne Theatre Company – and Albee’s bitingly funny work about a couple who love and loathe each other in equal measure was instantly intoxicating.

“Kat said, ‘I’m really interested in doing a play about female rage’, and I went, ‘you’re on’. That was the end of the conversation,” Goodes says.

But revisiting the play never felt like an exercise in dusting off a museum piece. “What’s so great about doing the classics is you go, ‘Oh, people have been dealing with the same stuff for years’,” Goodes says. “But also, it isn’t just about rage. It’s about how much they love each other, and how being alone in a relationship is terrifying.”

There’s an undeniable frisson in the idea of a real-life couple playing the hard-drinking, twisted game-playing academic George and his wife, Martha, who is just as smart as her husband but doomed by the times to have very few avenues to display it.

The most famous rendering of the play was the 1966 film, in which Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – then three years into the first of their two stormy, obsessive, booze-filled marriages – starred, alongside a young George Segal and Sandy Dennis as the young couple lured into the older pair’s toxicity. The film won five Oscars, including for Taylor and Dennis.

For Whiteley and Stewart, the biggest challenge has been dovetailing professional and family responsibilities when both parents are at the office at the same time.

“Logistically it’s a nightmare,” says Stewart. “If one of them gets sick ... well, no one can get sick.”

“When we get into the theatre, that’s fun, that’s easy,” adds Whiteley. “It’s just all the other stuff that’s hard to organise.”

But, if we can be candid here for a moment, do you two fight in your real-life relationship?

“Oh yeah,” says Whiteley.

“How dare you?” says Stewart.

“Kat fights,” he quips. “I just agree.”

“Phwoah,” she scoffs. “I think it’s unhealthy when couples don’t fight – it means they’re not engaged. I think it’s important to fight a bit. We don’t fight like George and Martha, though. These guys are off the charts. It’s savage. I mean, we’re not trying to destroy each other.”

Whiteley says: “People ask, ‘do you get confused between your character and your real life?’

“Well, no, not really. It’s a character. It’s a great character, I love the character, I love the situation, and I do draw from our relationship and our life. But we’re not living in the same sphere.”

Stewart adds: “I don’t want to get cocky because I don’t think anyone’s bulletproof … We’re obviously really kind to each other. But the part that’s been the most fun thing for me is that we get to be our work selves again after all these years. Because that’s how it started.

“We’ve got our work in common again, which is really cool.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at the Comedy Theatre from June 29 to July 21. Tickets: ticketek.com.au

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and Twitter at @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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