It premiered in 1962. The scene direction read “The living room of a house on the campus of a small New England college.” The three acts were titled “Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht,” and “The Exorcism.” The four characters were an older couple, Martha and George, and a younger couple, Honey and Nick. The plot: Martha and George, enmeshed and embittered, draw their guests into a hyper-verbal world of marital mind games. Play at your peril. Edward Albee’s first Broadway outing, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, electrified viewers and won the Tony for Best Play and the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In The New York Times, Howard Taubman wrote of the play’s “howling furies that do not drown out a fierce compassion.” Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill won raves as the first Martha and George. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starred, brilliantly, in the 1966 movie. Since then, stellar pairings have regularly appeared. A new production coming to the West End casts Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup as the destructive dynamic duo. The play is set in the round and directed by Marianne Elliott. —Laura Jacobs