The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?: shattering as many taboos as possible
14 Aug 2024 - Photos by David Hou

Stevie and Martin have a perfect life. After decades they are still in love. They are still having fulfilling sex. Their home is a showcase, beige and grey without even pastels, and Martin is about to receive a prestigious architectural award. They are witty, intelligent, environmentally aware, impeccably dressed, financially secure, and love and accept their gay son Billy. Yet the moment Lucy Peacock (Cymbeline) wanders on stage, exhibiting OCD as she fussily rearranges the flowers and artistic knick knacks, there is a sense of foreboding. She is Stevie and that it is a usually masculine or rock star name is not accidental. Rick Roberts (Cymbeline, Prodigal, Animal Farm, Prince Hamlet, An Enemy of the People) as Martin enters, mildly befuddled in an endearing way. The pair banter with affection but there is an edge to it. Each trying to outdo the other with cleverness, wielding compliments as comic insults. They can complete each other's sentences and often do. Something is troubling Martin but Stevie is off to get her hair done.

Enter Martin's oldest friend and college roommate Ross (Matthew Kabwe). The duo also banter but Ross is planning to interview Martin for a podcast celebrating Martin's 50th birthday and the architectural award. Ross quickly intuits that Martin is distracted and something is wrong. Martin confesses and Ross tells Stevie and all hell breaks loose. Playwright Edward Albee is known for his edgy comic dialogue, heightened realism, and the actors ground it with perfect timing and a lived-in quality. Though they are impossibly articulate, we believe in them as people we might know. That is crucial. We all know going in that there is a taboo line about to be crossed, but we are eased into it. It was fascinating to feel the audience react, as laughter slowly turned to confusion and horror, experiencing just what the characters are as they tear each other apart. And we keep laughing. Sometimes with the comedy and wit, sometimes out of shock, often at ourselves and our own reactions.

Director Dean Gabourie keeps the action tight, contained and brutal at a breakneck pace. The stage is outlined with white lines, a boxing ring for emotional violence. But these people do really love each other, their punches are from flailing in an impossible situation. No-one is going to win. It is not a spoiler to let it slip that Martin, having left the suburbs to search for an idyllic country home, has been seduced, or has taken advantage of, a goat that he names Sylvia. On a basic level Albee is exploring the limits of tolerance and acceptance. Stevie and Martin's son Billy is the first example. Anthony Palemero (She, Men & the Great F*cking Snake, The Gray) plays Billy as mildly rebellious, definitely exasperated, and struggling to come to terms with burgeoning sexuality by flaunting it. That makes him a target. If gay can be accepted, and Martin expresses some vile and formerly repressed invective about the lifestyle, then why not bestiality? Stevie and Martin had joked about affairs. Why is it worse when an animal is involved? 

More and more secrets are revealed questioning all the relationships and the hierarchy of what is acceptable. Ross and Martin have to reckon with an incident from their past, and Martin and Billy have a moment that shocked even me. Albee throws morality into the abyss and leaves us completely disoriented. And still laughing through the gasps. Only Stevie has claim to a higher moral ground. Peacock is a marvel as she struggles to believe that this is happening. When Martin reveals he has been to, a sensible middle-class way of dealing with a problem, a support group, Stevie spits out "Goat Fuckers Anonymous?" Peacock delivers the line like a missile, obliterating everything while still earning uproarious laughter. And when she cedes her advantage and commits strategic warfare, it is terrifying. Her self-satisfied smile as she makes a final decision is gloriously horrific. Her OCD has triumphed at a terrible—or a logical and satisfying?—price. 

Roberts gives Martin an anguished edge, he doesn't understand why this overwhelming love, and he feels it as love not lust, has happened. But crucially, he makes us believe that he is in love. With a goat. It teeters between comic (an ode to the grass on her breath), explicit (Ross wants details), and anguish. Suspended between farce and tragedy with nothing beneath our feet but Albee's macabre wit. Kabwe fills in the onstage role of the audience, the everyman, who wanders the stage in various stages of disbelief. Billy pops in and out as a buffer between Stevie and Martin as the battle rages. Then he returns to help pick up the pieces, literally, with a shattered Martin. It is here that Palermo faces the toughest challenge as Albee saddles him with a monologue that while crucial is just too long considering the sturm und drang that has preceded. Palermo rallies to the task and lets the vulnerabilities that the other characters work hard to conceal spill out. But no matter what anyone does or says, there is no going back or surviving intact. The one certainty that Albee and this production give us, is that after fucking a goat, nothing will ever be the same.