Edward Albee, the American playwright behind A Delicate Balance, is best known for penning the 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virigina Woolf?, a seminal look at marriage turned catastrophically sour. With A Delicate Balance, he offers a similarly bleak outlook on American family life.

The three acts are all set in one living room, in an upper-middle-class household. The householders are Agnes (Mary Stuck) and Tobias (Nick Quartley), who are expecting their thirty-something daughter Julia (Esther Edlundh-Rose), to return home after the collapse of her fourth marriage.

But before Julia does return, tensions are running high. Civility between Agnes and her live-in sister Claire (Lisa Barnett) is diminishing rapidly. Claire is an alcoholic who, though still lucid and incredibly witty, is becoming increasingly bitter and failing to attend her Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. To compound the bad timing, the couple have house guests, family friends Harry (Colin Macnee) and Edna (Angela Myers).

In a manner similar to his most famous play, Albee creates a world in which the anger and hatred turn increasingly operatic, thanks to a lot of on-stage cognac and whisky consumption. Insults are traded and relationships disintegrate in a play that is pleasingly cathartic and dynamic but doesn’t quite feature the right amount of positive counterpoint to offset and contrast the catalogue of human misery on display.

And with the production running to about two-and-a-half hours, there is a lot of misery to observe. The men are portrayed as weak and generally emasculated; at one stage, Tobias mourns the loss of his long-dead cat in a particularly toe-curling display of self-pity. Claire denies furiously that she is an alcoholic, as she asks for another cognac.

Oxford Theatre Guild’s production was a rather reserved reading. The dialogue was often spoken slowly and deliberately. Only Lisa Barnett, as Claire, had a convincing American accent, and also she was the only one to really nail the speed that the dialogue should read at. Perhaps a watch of the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would have solved the problem; it needed to be fast. The direction, from Polly Mountain, was a little static and lacked the spikiness and menace of the best Albee productions.

Although not quite Albee’s best work, A Delicate Balance features enough bile and heightened emotion to make an entertaining night out. Unfortunately, this production fell a little flat. The result was oddly jarring, thanks to the stately nature of the direction, and proved ultimately unsatisfying.