Gillian Anderson will step into the ring with Billy Crudup in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In London | stage

Gillian Anderson will return to the West End in the role she has coveted “for decades”. The Sex Education star will appear opposite Billy Crudup in a revival of Edward Albee’s marital breakdown classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the fall. The production will be staged in a carousel by Marianne Elliott in the intimate @sohoplace theatre.

Anderson will play Martha, who quarrels with her professor husband, George, over drinks with a young couple in the 1962 play. “Martha’s rage is inseparable from her longing, her disappointment, her need to be seen — all things that are still eminently connected 60 years later,” Anderson said. The role was first played on Broadway by Uta Hagen, on screen a few years later by Elizabeth Taylor (opposite her husband Richard Burton) and in the 1996 London revival by Diana Rigg. “I’ve wanted to play Martha for decades,” Anderson said. “I’m thrilled to have Billy Crudup join me in the ring as George.”

Crudup became a regular theater performer in London. The Morning Show star made his West End stage debut in 2024 portraying 19 characters in a one-man show, Harry Clarke. He’s back for a musical version of the Western High Noon that closed earlier this month. Anderson’s London stage roles have included Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, which created a sensation at the Young Vic Theater in 2014, and Broadway star Margo Channing in All About Eve, based on the Hollywood classic, in 2019.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play of astonishing emotional precision — brutal, intelligent and very human,” said Elliott, whose upcoming projects include directing Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey in Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George at the Barbican” next summer.

The show is created by Miriam Poyther and will be produced by Nica Burns, owner of @sohoplace, and Sonya Friedman Productions. Burns called it “the first classic American play” to be staged at the New Theater, which opened in 2022. For Friedman, it is “one of the defining plays of modern theater — raw, brutally funny, and devastating in equal measure.”

The play, which also stars Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horne, runs from September 21 to December 19.