The versatile Open Space Theatre company are touring Albee’s 1960s classic study of marriage, aspirations and personal pain levels in a production by David Green that is masterful, moving and memorable.

Yves Green and Peter Sowerbutts are the well-matched, long married couple who niggle and goad each other with alcohol-fuelled vitriol. They sustain the rollercoasster of emotion superbly, ultimately revealing how their fantasies and games have fed them and how their sometimes mutual loathing is another side of love and need.

Mick Davison and Emma Martin are the young couple, their increasingly reluctant guests, who watch in horror as their hosts wield personal emotion scalpels before themselves being gradually drawn into the dance that wedlock, offspring issues and thwarted ambition have become.

It is a challenging play forcing the audience to face realities of relationships and this cast raise the emotion stakes outstandingly well. Not to be missed.

David Porter

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at St Edmunds Hall, Hoxne (13 May), Wingfield Barns (15), Beccles Public Hall (21) and Halesworth’s Cut (23).