Thus Albee now has two influential patrons in Britain: a small but perfectly formed fringe theatre

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Thus Albee now has two influential patrons in Britain: a small but perfectly formed fringe theatre, and the West End impresario Robert Fox. "All that time, a 10- or 12-year period when I wasn't ever put on in New York or London, I had lots of plays in the rest of Europe, around the United States, Latin America, just not New York City. But everybody in the theatre in America thinks New York City is the centre of the universe."Whatever, the Almeida promptly caught the wave by reviving Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in a staging so successful that, in a coals-to-Newcastle kind of way, it made it all the way to Broadway. As in, how do the ideas make their way into his head in the first place? "Probably because I'm a writer. And they're plays rather than novels because I am a playwright." Ouch. Or why did Three Tall Women, the first Albee play ever to earn unanimous critical approval, open in the New York equivalent of the Almeida? "Probably because Broadway management thought it was too - what's that terrible word? - dark. And also no chandeliers crashed to the floor."Despite the safety-first policy on Broadway (carbon-copied, Albee believes, in London's West End), Three Tall Women - premiered in Vienna in 1991 and seen here three years later in a production starring Maggie Smith - rescued its author from a slough of commercial despondency Not that he quite sees it that way.

And when they stretch their legs and wander about a bit, they seem to be using their length to crush the crassness out of the question. You can usually tell you've been doltish when the first word of his answer is "probably". But that doesn't mean he's any easier to interview than his plays are to watch. His answers can be unusually short, as if, in his own certainty, he has no need of prolixity. But open the front door and all you can see is rage and cruelty and slurping alcoholism. Let's get one thing out of the way Albee doesn't touch alcohol - or hasn't for over 20 years. "I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who have done that to a certain extent." A gym-honed 68, Albee is somewhere between the end and the middle of a life in which he has participated far more actively than George and Martha, the couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whose idea of hell is each other.So, there's daylight between him and the broiling despair of his characters.

As for the rage and the cruelty, Albee would argue that his characters tend to display these as the result of a malaise that he himself has taken pains to avoid. But yes, the exterior is very civilised in a mud-coloured tweed sort of way. This is not an original observation, but he is the spitting image of Roy Strong, wiry and grey and long-faced (though with a much less horticultural moustache than either Strong's or the black ferret in his own absurdly out-of-date mugshot on the back of the Penguin edition of Three Tall Women). Edward Albee's best known plays have the civilised exterior of East Coast comfort: there are no inarticulate Eddie Carbones in his view from the bridge, only profs and tennis club habitues and well-heeled products of the WASP factory. Enter `Three Tall Women' and a new run of successes on Broadway and in the West End.