''If they could see her through my eyes, maybe they'd all understand," sings the master of ceremonies in Cabaret, while stepping out with a monkey. In his new play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Edward Albee takes us one taboo further. The object of desire for Martin, a highly acclaimed architect who has just turned 50, is right there in the play's title. In case we missed it on our way into the theatre, he blurts out the truth of his passion in the first moments dur-ing some banter with his wife, Stevie. She laughs it off, as you would. So we all get to share in the tension, built up in a brilliantly nervy per-formance by Jonathan Pryce, as Martin steels himself to share the burden of his secret with his best friend Ross (played by Matthew Marsh).
Albee tells us in a programme note that he is pushing the boundaries in a way that playwrights should. Nowadays you have to push quite a distance to raise an eyebrow. Is it possible that, in our lifetimes, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner shocked people by challenging the intolerance of marriage between black and white? Or that E M Forster's Maurice, published posthumously in 1971, trod new ground with its portrayal of gay love?
To reinforce the point, we find at first that Martin has taken in his stride, more or less, the fact that his 17-year-old son Billy is a promiscuous homosexual. Billy doesn't find it easy to be quite so liberal when he discovers his father's penchant, and Martin retaliates but demeans himself by taunting his son with homophobic abuse. Then again, most of Martin's male friends are serial adulterers. The men have a laugh together as they brag about their mistresses. Martin feels excluded and inadequate because, in 20 years of marriage, he has never had sex with any woman other than Stevie. So I suppose we're meant to ask how it is that adultery, which is debasing and destructive, is nearly de rigueur, while bestiality, also debasing and destructive, remains taboo?
Then Albee asks us to consider if the act itself is wrong, as the outraged Stevie naturally thinks, or whether what matters is the risk of being caught, exposed and destroyed, which is Ross's main pre- occupation. The question is made more difficult because Martin isn't ashamed, can't understand why we don't understand, and says that he and the quad- ruped Sylvia are in love. Albee, in his programme note, invites us to leave our prejudices in the cloakroom, telling us that the play isn't about bestiality but tolerance, love and loss.
The problem is that Albee is unwilling to take his own subject seriously. Largely it's played for laughs. One joke is that the clever, liberal, Democrat-voting characters are constantly correcting each other's grammar, and as the horrible revelations tear their lives apart, they go on with their semantic nitpicking, much to the audience's amusement. Another joke concerns a self-help group for people who want to kick their bestial habit, which attracts the lovers of a young pig, a German Shepherd and a goose. This is all a tease, Albee seems to be saying, and so the play doesn't really test our tolerance and doesn't require that much courage from the author after all.
Would the show have enjoyed its suc-cess on Broadway (which is likely to be repeated here, judging by the audience's enthusiastic response) had it not been so funny and therefore such a cop-out? The idea of a middle-aged man being lovingly committed to a dewy-eyed goat is hard to take seriously. It would have tested our tolerance further if our respected archi-tect had been lustfully promiscuous across the whole farmyard. Or, if Albee really wanted to push the envelope, why didn't he invite us to feel sympathy for a paedophile? I'm not sure that would have packed in the audiences so easily.
Kate Fahy plays the bewildered and humiliated wife to the extent allowed by the script, but there are serious limits. She's not allowed to cry, and she has to punctuate her anguish with flippant remarks about syntax, as well as angrily smashing up her house (for more laughs).
The play follows classical rules of unity, with three scenes taking place in a single location within 24 hours, and so you might have guessed that revenge would feature, too. But when it came, it reminded me more of Play Misty for Me than The Oresteia. There's a sub-plot that involves Billy (rather hysterically played by Eddie Redmayne) having a moment of sexual feeling for his father, but Albee didn't seem to want to pursue it far - so neither will I.
This goat turns out to be a sheep in wolf's clothing.
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020 7359 4404) until 13 March
