‘A Delicate Balance’

Abstract

A Delicate Balance is a remarkably clear and deft piece of work, and these qualities may have accounted for its qualified success in New York in 1966. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the 1963 adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe seemed to confirm the dramatist as a specialist in the grotesque. His plays were varied in style but showed the same tendency to push the subject to the limits. ‘Sensational’ was the word most frequently used in the press to describe Albee in those years, and also describes how people viewed the content of his theatre. Even the obscurities of Tiny Alice did not prevent its theatricality from being appreciated.