SOURCE: "The Habit and the Hatred," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4880, October 11, 1996, p. 23.

In the following excerpt of a review of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Campbell surveys the history of the play.

It is worth remembering, while enduring the three-and-a-half hour comic nightmare of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that the play emerged from the Theatre of the Absurd. Albee's early one-acters, such as Zoo Story and The American Dream (in which a couple have gruesomely disposed of one of their sons in order to fit the picture of the American way of life), suggested a line of inheritance from Adamov and Ionesco. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, written in 1961 and first performed in the following year, was a departure: a well-made play, with a domestic setting, replete with wider references from the "world of ideas", particularly relating to science and civilization. In spite of its surface...