Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tickets at Soho Place Theatre
Two o'clock in the morning, a faculty party is over, and a married couple have brought a younger pair home for one more drink. Nobody gets to leave.
All-in: the price you pick is the price you pay.
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020 7193 9050 · Monday to Saturday 8am to 8pm, Sunday 10am to 8pm
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Who Is This Best For?
- Anyone who wants to watch two very good actors do something difficult. Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup.
- People who like a play that does not let up. Albee wrote a night that starts badly and gets worse, and the joy is watching how it all goes wrong.
- Up close and personal in-the-round. It is set in one living room, and the audience surrounds it.
- Chance to be in the West End's newest theatre, which opened in 2022.
It is probably not for you if you want an easy evening. This is three and a half hours of a marriage taking itself apart, with drink and cruelty.
It's for ages 14 and over, and anyone under 15 needs an adult with them. Expect swearing, shouting and a lot of drinking: the production's own note lists strong language, intense verbal rows, and references to alcoholism, infertility and child loss.
Availability, which is the first thing to know
Most performances are sold out. What comes back is single seats and late returns, so if you want to go, check several dates rather than one and check again nearer the day. Give us a ring and we will check what is genuinely free on your date rather than what a calendar suggests.
When it plays
Evenings Monday to Saturday at 7pm, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday at 1:30pm. There is no Sunday performance.
Note the 7pm start, which is half an hour earlier than most West End evenings. At approximately three and a half hours, with an interval, that puts you out around 10:30pm, and it means dinner beforehand needs to be earlier than you might assume.
What happens
George is a history professor who has not gone as far as he should have. Martha is the daughter of the college president, and she married him expecting more. Late one night they bring home Nick, a new young biologist, and his wife Honey.
What follows is a series of games. They have names, Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess, and finally Bringing Up Baby, and each is worse than the one before, played for an audience of two people who cannot leave.
Nothing supernatural happens and nobody leaves. It is four people, a great deal of drink, and two marriages taken apart in front of each other.
Dates & tickets
Tickets and Best Seats
All-in pricing, the price you see is what you pay.
Seats run from around £40 up to around £110, with premium seats from around £120.
In practice this is a sold-out run, so the question is usually not which band to choose but whether anything is left on your date. Singles come up more often than pairs.
Where to sit, if you get the choice
There is no bad side and no back of the room. The seating wraps the stage completely and nothing is more than six rows out, so the only real question is how close you want to be.
Close, in the inner rings of the Stalls, puts you at the edge of the room these four people are trapped in. For this play in particular, that is an unusual thing to be offered.
Back a little, or up in the First Balcony, gives you a raised and completely clear view of the whole stage, which lets you watch all four of them at once. Useful in a play where whoever is silent is usually the one worth watching.
The one to think twice about is the outermost ring of the Stalls, which uses raised bar-stool seats that are awkward to climb into.
Our Soho Place Theatre guide goes through all three levels.
Seating plan
Dates & tickets
Booking now
Soho Place Theatre
4 Soho Place, London W1D 3BG, effectively on top of Tottenham Court Road station: Northern, Central and Elizabeth lines, about a minute's walk. The best-connected theatre in the West End.
602 seats, in the round, and the newest theatre in the West End: it opened in October 2022 and was the first built from scratch here in fifty years. No pillars, no overhang, and nothing more than six rows from the stage.
Getting to your seat is easier here than anywhere else in theatreland. The building is step-free from the street with lifts to every level, and there is a free cloakroom that takes suitcases.
Accessible performances: Saturday 24 October (BSL), Saturday 7 November (audio described) and Saturday 21 November (captioned), each at 1:30pm. The theatre's own team takes those bookings, not us.
Everything else about the building is in our Soho Place Theatre guide: which level suits which kind of evening, how the in-the-round staging affects what you see, and where to eat within a few minutes.
Address
4 Soho Place, London W1D 3BG
Nearest Tube
Tottenham Court Road
Cast and Creative Team
| Role | Actor |
|---|---|
| Martha | Gillian Anderson |
| George | Billy Crudup |
| Nick | Josh Dylan |
| Honey | Phoebe Horn |
Understudies: Jessica Kirton, Simon Willmont, Alex Cartuson and Georgia Miles.
Directed by Marianne Elliott, with designs by Miriam Buether, lighting by James Farncombe and sound by Ian Dickinson. Ingrid Mackinnon is movement and intimacy director and Sam Lyon-Behan is fight director, which tells you something about the evening before it starts.
Marianne Elliott opened this theatre. Her Much Ado About Nothing was the first production ever staged at Soho Place, in October 2022. She is back in the same room four years later with a very different play.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Reviews
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on 30 September 2026, and most critics gave it four or five stars. The Telegraph's Claire Allfree called it "an absolute knock-out evening" (5/5), and the FT's Sarah Hemming said it was "Shockingly good" (5/5). The Guardian and the Times gave three.
Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup were praised almost everywhere, and a few critics thought Crudup was even better than her. Sitting this close was a big part of it: the Independent said the staging leaves you feeling "skin-crawlingly guilty by association" (5/5). The doubts were about length and bite. The Times's Dominic Maxwell thought it felt "a good half hour too long" (3/5), and the Guardian wanted it to be more dangerous for more of the evening.
If you're going for the two stars, the critics say they deliver. If three and a half hours of a marriage falling apart sounds like hard going, a few reviewers found it exactly that. The full round-up is in What the Critics Say.
The last time London saw it
The most recent major London production was in 2017, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, with Imelda Staunton as Martha and Conleth Hill as George, directed by James Macdonald. It ran from February to May.
That was a conventional staging behind a proscenium arch. This one is in the round, which is a very different proposition for a play set in one room, and it is the reason to see this production if you saw that one.
Billy Crudup was last on a London stage in 2024, in Harry Clarke at the Ambassadors.
Three things people ask about this play
Is it about Virginia Woolf? No. Nobody in it mentions her. The characters sing the line to a Disney tune, and Albee took it from graffiti he had seen in a bar. The novelist's name simply stands in for the wolf, and the question underneath is whether you can get through life without something to hide behind.
Why was it controversial? It was judged not "uplifting" enough to win a Pulitzer. The 1963 drama jury recommended it and the board overruled them over its profanity and sexual content, then awarded no drama prize at all that year. Two jurors resigned in protest, one telling the press it was "a case of advice without consent." The play won two Tonys, the New York Drama Critics' Circle award and the Evening Standard award anyway, and Albee took the Pulitzer three years later for a different play, which most people read as an apology.
Is this the Elizabeth Taylor one? It is the same play. Taylor was 33 when she played Martha in Mike Nichols's 1966 film, opposite Richard Burton, and won the Academy Award for it. Most people come to the title through that film. Seeing it staged with an audience wrapped round the room is a different experience entirely.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Soho Place