Since its premiere in 1962, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has been code for intellectual word play that shoots to kill. Though the play has been endlessly produced onstage, most know it from the Oscar-winning 1966 film that stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Now the director Lindsay Posner, a West-End veteran, helms a new production of the marital drama—an alcohol-fueled evening in which George and Martha, an aging faculty couple enmeshed in mind games, pull a younger faculty couple into their vortex. Elizabeth McGovern—yes, Downton Abbey’s gentle Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham—is cast as mocking Martha. Dougray Scott takes the role of George, a seemingly passive history professor. —Jensen Davis