Edward Albee has “written 28 plays over 44 years, but as he wrote in the programme notes for the Almeida’s 1996 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that play, premiered on Broadway in 1962, has “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous”. Among American playwrights he ranks alongside Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and like them he has suffered critical rejection.”