The Stage

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

Published Monday 9 February 2004 at 17:25 by Gareth Evans

An acclaimed architect, the increasingly forgetful Martin - compellingly played by Jonathan Pryce - has it all; prizes, global commissions, a dynamic marriage and an adoring, albeit troubled, teenage son. Why, then, does he fall in love with a goat? The fallout from what appears to be an ecstatic, transcendent encounter is explored in a series of increasingly destructive dialogues with his oldest friend, son and wife.

It makes sense that Martin is losing his memory as he is shaping a new self. But, in embracing true otherness, he has broken a primal taboo.

With extreme precision, Edward Albee excavates the limits of tolerance, whether personal, social, political, cultural or, finally, biological. Scratching away a surface that can barely contain man’s raw urges, he has fashioned a literal and metaphorical agent that genuinely attains the reach of Greek tragedy - a word which has its etymological roots in the Greek for ‘goat song’.

Language’s ability to communicate experience is scrutinised within the play and there appears to be an encryption here that truly makes the drama a work for our times. As Gore Vidal revealed in a startling personal essay, when the aeroplanes crashed into the twin towers on September 11, 2001, George Bush was talking to a Florida schoolgirl about her pet goat. The terrible implications, stemming from that moment, of his failure to empathise with the greater ‘other’, find their most concentrated incarnation in Albee’s profound and multifarious masterpiece.