It started with a kiss on stage, now this real-life couple is fighting it out

In its devastating and hilarious portrayal of a relationship breakdown whose intensity rivals that of a civil war, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains one of the pinnacles of modern drama. As middle-aged couple George and Martha return home from a boozy party, they’re already taking snarky potshots and stepping into each other’s carefully laid traps.

The arrival of young colleagues Nick and Honey for a nightcap offers the older pair the chance to escalate the battle by playing the newcomers like pawns. Before long, we’re witnessing an emotional landscape laid bare by truth bombs and incendiary revelations.

Kat Stewart and David Whiteley are putting their relationship to the test by playing the tempestuous couple at the centre of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Credit: Simon Schluter

Kind of dangerous territory for a real-life couple to be wandering into, right?

“We may need to get some couples therapy, who knows?” says David Whiteley.

Adds Kat Stewart: “Or maybe this is it. Maybe this is the couples therapy!”

Stewart and Whiteley first met as ensemble members at St Kilda’s Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre in the early 2000s – they shared their first kiss onstage before anything romantic was happening in the wings. Now, after marriage, kids and the rest, they’re returning to the company to celebrate its 21st anniversary playing theatre’s most tempestuous lovers.

As its name suggests, Red Stitch is an actor-driven company run by its ensemble. Whiteley was a founding member and Stewart signed on soon after its inception. In those early years, the two worked together on a bunch of productions before Stewart’s burgeoning screen career took her away from the stage and Whiteley took over as the company’s artistic director. The pair haven’t performed together since 2007.

“Seeing Dave in a rehearsal room is a very big kick for me,” says Stewart. “We haven’t had that experience since we’ve been grown-ups. Since we’ve had a life and a family and all that stuff. Getting back in the sandpit together is really nice.”

The theatre life can attract larger than life characters whose relationships are as volatile as those they play, but Stewart and Whiteley are refreshingly easy-going. Stewart’s successes in Underbelly and Offspring meant they held off on having kids for a long time – after Archie and later Gigi were born, Whiteley would be there on set looking after the babies while Stewart was shooting. They rarely bring work home with them today. It all sounds very low-drama.

Elizabeth Taylor on the couch with Richard Burton in a scene from the 1966 film of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?Credit: Warner Brothers/Getty Images

A mile away from George and Martha, then. It would be easy in the present climate to write off that relationship as toxic and call it a day. But playwright Edward Albee has written two characters so deeply charismatic, fiercely intelligent and impossible to pin down, it’s hard to look away. Just as they’re manipulating the impressionable Nick and Honey, they’re also enlisting us to their respective sides as collaborators, turning our sympathies against their opponent.

When the play premiered in 1962, it appalled some critics for the vulgarity of its language and the way it tore through the polite veneer of theatre to reveal how nasty relationships can get. Enough were impressed by the writing to guarantee it a long shelf life, however, and its reputation has only grown. A 1966 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – another real-life couple, who famously married and divorced twice – brought the story to an even wider public, and it’s long been recognised as a masterpiece.

It hasn’t lost any of its power to provoke. “It’s still a cesspit,” says Whiteley.

Adds Stewart: “It’s dirty. It’s really shocking. The violence of it, the cruelty of it, and all the game playing. But I do believe the play’s a love story. It’s absolutely a love story. It’s a very messy one, but it is.”

Albee’s play is regularly taught to students, but approaching George and Martha at this point in their lives – Stewart and Whiteley are in their late 40s – gives them a deeper sense of the struggle that drives their tumultuous to and fro.

“It’s feeling yourself of an age where you’re not the centre of attention any more,” says Whiteley. “This is what a lot of the play’s concerned with, middle age, where you’re suddenly drifting, and the focus is going elsewhere. That’s what they’re desperately fighting for and are frustrated by. But it is a love story and based on a very deep, dark connection.”

Kat Stewart and David Whiteley in the play Down the Road, a 2002 production they did together at Red Stitch.

If social norms have changed in the 60-plus years since the play’s debut, life in the theatre has been undergoing its own transformation. Actors are more aware of the pitfalls of their profession – how emotionally difficult roles require a careful approach. The other day Stewart noticed some pamphlets in the Red Stitch kitchen with advice on coming out of character after a show’s end. “I had a flip through and thought,‘Well, that’s a good idea,’” she says.

Back in the days when Red Stitch first formed, actors were taught a kind of sink-or-swim mentality – it wasn’t uncommon for acting courses to ask students to confess their most painful memories, strip naked or push themselves to physical extremes. It’s only recently that the industry has reassessed the situation.

“I did a play at MTC a few years ago called Disgraced,” says Stewart. “And it was a play with big arguments and racial slurs and stuff, and we had a little ritual before each show, a group hug, and we looked in each actor’s eyes and said ‘I love you’. Then we went out and destroyed each other.

“That sort of thing is really healthy. I think we’re more mindful of taking care of our relationships and our mental health.”

Whiteley says the strength and longevity of their relationship is what puts them in good stead to tackle such challenging roles. “Because we’re already a couple we have that base level trust and love that helps us,” he says.

“As an actor it’s like being a painter. You draw on emotions from wherever they serve you. That may be your partner, it may be a situation that happened to you when you were a young child. Your emotions are colours you use to apply to the work.”

Kat Stewart (left) on the set of Offspring with Asher Keddie. Stewart says being on stage is “much harder than being on telly.”

Stewart is equally confident. “I feel that these people are very different to us. But it’s so early. In December, when we finish, I might give you a very different answer!”

The emotional guardrails are in place, but other realities make this kind of feat a tricky one to pull off. For one, there’s the logistics of both parents being out on school nights. “We have two little kids and usually when one of us is working, the other picks up the slack.”

There’s also the fact that though they might be an actor couple, they’re not a double act. “We’ve been learning lines separately,” says Stewart. “I don’t know why. We’ve got different ways of working, I think, and we’re used to working separately.”

Stewart and Whiteley’s careers have been a mix of stage and screen roles, but the difference is stark. “Screen work is fine, but it’s a bit like being on camp or something, stuck out in a trailer waiting to go on,” says Whiteley, who has appeared on Jack Irish and The Doctor Blake Mysteries. “It’s kind of exhausting. I love being on set, but that’s such a small part of the actual experience. It’s like a military operation or something, making a TV show.”

Adds Stewart: “Yeah, but honestly, it’s a lark. How much harder is this? It’s much harder than being on telly.”

In film and TV you have dozens, even hundreds of people whose job it is to make you look good. “In theatre all you’ve got is the play text, so it has to be amazing,” says Whiteley.

The intimacy and immediacy of theatre might be part of its attraction, but it also means you have no safety net. “There’s a lot to lose doing a play,” says Whiteley. “You can feel like you could fall on your face and be dragged down the street by critics, by audiences, by yourself. I’ve been in plays where at half-time I’ve thought, ‘Maybe I can just make a run for it.’”

Adds Stewart: “I’ve fantasised about witness protection.”

But the thrill of live performance – and the place they first met – means they’ll never be far from Red Stitch.

“That’s where we got to know each other,” says Stewart. “It’s part of our history.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, St Kilda, from November 15 to December 17.