Why does Edward Albee hate directors?

For bitter or worse: Edward Albee thinks the playwright should be in charge. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe.

He's got Pulitzers and Tonys, and the revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had rave reviews. So is playwright Edward Albee softening with success?

No, of course he's not. The question - posed by LA Weekly - was followed by "Are there any hopeful signs in the American theater?" Albee replied as follows:

"We have no paucity of good young playwrights, and good older playwrights; we don't have the happiest environment for them to work in. Like in the art world and in literature, the theater's just as trendy, as dangerous and corrupt. The big problem is the assumption that writing a play is a collaborative act. It isn't. It's a creative act, and then other people come in. The interpretation should be for the accuracy of what the playwright wrote. Playwrights are expected to have their text changed by actors they never wanted. Directors seem to feel they are as creative as the playwright. Most of these changes are for commercial reasons. I know a lot about it because I'm on the council of the Dramatists Guild, but of course the pressures are on all of us. I'm in the lucky position where I just say, 'Go fuck yourself; if you don't want to do the play I wrote, do another play.' The forces of darkness would back down if everybody said that."

Bloggers have found much to debate in his pronouncement in recent weeks. They have found Albee to be out of touch, right on the money, and guilty of breaking some unofficial artistic entente. (The Mirror up to Nature has even expanded on the interview's references to Tiny Alice.)

"I'm tired of theater people talking like victims", adds theatre director Isaac Butler in Parabasis. "We're not victims. Or we are, but so is everyone else so what the heck does it matter?"

Albee has always thought it matters a lot that his plays are not distorted - "either through intention or inattention" - as when, for instance, the cast for a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? includes four men instead of two men and two women. Little noted, but springing from the same convictions, is his criticism in that LA Weekly interview of the film version of his most famous play: "The movie was so much tougher before they put in that awful soppy music. I don't like movie music, being told how to react. The music softened the film."

It is no less a distortion when a director, as Albee thinks quite possible, disguises a play's deficiencies. In his world, it's the writer who should be in charge no matter what. It is telling that Albee has also argued for the value of reading plays, cutting out those pesky middle men and women, the directors and actors. (Is he in the right job?)

Perhaps Albee, now in his 70s, simply hasn't met the right director yet. If so, he will be relieved to hear that there are understanding souls out there. According to Richard Eyre: "It's very rare that a production is better than the play: water doesn't rise above its source."

A pity, then, that Eyre called Albee's Virginia Woolf "melodramatic", and much preferred the production to the play.