Albee's tall tale

It's as easy as ABC. Well it should be easy, given that Edward Albee's play Three Tall Women contains just three principal characters, and they are simply named A, B, and C. They spend the whole play in one room, sharing memories of life love, pain, disappointments, joys all are dissected.

A wide canvas certainly, but surely a much more straightforward job for a theatre director than, say, preparing a musical or an opera?

Actually no, it isn't. You very soon learn that lesson by watching director Irina Brown rehearsing the Oxford Playhouse's own new production of the play, which opens next week.

"When do I sit down?" asks Anna-Louise Plowman, who is playing C. The answer is that C sits at the end of a piece of movement that involves all three characters. The precise moment is being choreographed every bit as carefully as it would be in a ballet or a musical.

Playwright Albee is well known for issuing precise instructions on how he wants his plays staged.

"He tries to be as clear as possible on the page," Irina Brown explains during a break in rehearsals. "Like a composer, he puts the notation down he would say allegro, or moderato. After that, it's up to you as the director to interpret those instructions in all the millions of ways that are possible. Otherwise, it would be the same as listening to the same concert over and over again. Albee is like Mozart: he is extremely precise and yet, if you interpret deeply enough, you have freedom within that precision.

"But the challenge is incredible. Like Mozart, you think this writer has said everything what is there for me to add? It's a nightmare, but a joy at the same time. There's nowhere to hide. You can't say Oh, I didn't know', because it's all there in the text."

Irina should know about Mozart because during the course of a very wide-ranging career she has directed everything from grand opera to The Sound of Music: "I think I am just greedy," she laughs. "I want to do everything. So long as it's theatrically exciting, it doesn't matter to me whether it's a pantomime or an existentialist play. I don't agree that everything I do must be deep and meaningful just because I am Russian."

Unlike Mozart, however, Albee is still very much alive. Does Irina feel that he is looking over her shoulder, breathing down her neck even, as she rehearses Three Tall Women?

"Oh God, no. Absolutely not. I've directed a lot of plays by living authors and I find it an exhilarating experience. You feel that you're in a lively dialogue with somebody who is living and breathing the same air as you, even if they are on the other side of the pond. I am very lucky to have met the man himself, 18 months ago, when I was first talking about doing this play. I discovered that he passionately cares about things, but he is not a schoolmaster with a stick.

"When we sat down to lunch, the first thing Albee said to me was: The women have to be tall'. To which I rather smugly replied: I know, I have read the title'. I thought: Ha, ha, I am so clever'. But I didn't understand the wicked light in his eyes, I hadn't realised that with so many actresses you don't think of their height, because their presence on stage is so mammoth.

"But here you need three actresses who are both tall, and extraordinarily powerful. In a sense, it's your King Lear, it's that level of part for the three women. One has to make sure that three actresses of that quality are available all at the same time, and that they are also tall."

Back in the rehearsal room, the play's sudden changes of mood are already becoming apparent. C, the youngest woman, is offering to prepare cheques in settlement of A's bills, so all she has to do is to sign them. "None of you think I can handle my own affairs?" asks A. Albee's stage direction specifies that this line is delivered with "a superior smile, but hesitant around the edges".

It would be quite easy, I suggest to Irina, for audiences to lose interest in the close-up minutiae of the three women's lives.

"Yes, it could be," she agrees. "But as always in the theatre, it's all about rhythm and tempo. I think audiences get bored when the tempo is wrong. That's when I get bored, and suddenly don't know why the hell I'm here. The art is in bringing a play like this to life, to give it a three-dimensional existence. Life is endlessly changeable and Albee captures that."

In a note at the beginning of the script, Albee describes character A as: "A very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow". B, meanwhile "looks rather as A would have at 52".

A is played by Marjorie Yates, perhaps best known as Carol in Channel 4's Shameless. She was just off to Australia when the phone rang.

"They said: Are you interested in doing this?' So I looked at the script. They said I'd be playing character A, and I thought they must mean B, because she's in her fifties. So I rang my agent, who said: No, no, it's A'. So I replied: Don't they know how old I am?' Then I heard that Maggie Smith had played the part, and I realised that you need a younger person who had enough stamina to play a lady of 91 there's a hell of a lot of lines to learn, and there's crying and screaming and, hopefully, some laughs too. You couldn't expect a 91-year-old to do that although I was just reading in the paper about a man who scored a try at the age of 90."

Albee's description of A continues: "Nails scarlet, hair nicely done, wears make-up. Lovely nightgown and dressing gown". "I'm having a grey wig," Marjorie revealed, "And I'll have to ask if they want me to wear false nails. Physically, I'm not really right for the part, because the other two girls are very skinny. At least I'm fairly tall 5ft 6ins but, of course, A would have shrunk a bit by the time she got to 91."

With rehearsals well under way, I wondered whether anything had surprised Marjorie Yates in this, her first encounter with character A.

"I've been very surprised by the difficulty of learning the play, we all have. Albee is a stylised writer. He says that when he's writing he feels as if he is composing a string quartet. He uses a lot of semi-colons. But once you get it right you think: Oh, that was dead easy'."

Three Tall Women opens at the Oxford Playhouse on Thursday and runs until Saturday, May 13. Tickets are available on 01865 305305.