Virginia

Virginia, a play by the multi award winning feminist Irish writer Edna O’Brien, is based on Virginia Woolf’s personal relationships with her father, her husband (Leonard Woolf), and her lover Vita Sackville West. Nicholas Opolski (director and designer) offers a curious and bold interpretation of the original text.

Opolski has struck gold with his casting decisions - Heather Lythe, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Woolf, offers an astute and insightful depiction. She plays as a grown woman and a younger more fragile Virginia, maintaining a persistently moody, anxious, and often melancholic balance in her performance. Marc Opitz is wonderful as her difficult father and as her doting and considerate husband Leonard Woolf.

O’Brien felt a connection with Woolf, as a trapped woman in a madness while tolerating resistance from family members, both sharing a desire for personal isolation to find voice in their own art as writers. Both struggled with separation anxiety, from loss of their mothers early in life and the demands of an overbearing father. Virginia may be biographical, but it bares strong resemblance to O’Brien’s own life.

Opolski made the decision to introduce Vanessa Bell as a singular character (referred to as Nessa {Beth Klein} in the original), Virginia’s older sisters, and a successful painter, and like Virginia, part of the Bloomsbury circle back in the early part of the twentieth century. But Klein’s strength lies in her flaunty role as Vita Sackville West, who was Virginia’s lover and muse.

Despite Virginia’s successes, she continuously suffered with Bi-polar disorder, and as there was no effective treatment during her lifetime, it was a deeply worrisome concern. Her early years were tumultuous, surrounded by the death of her mother and other siblings, all whilst sexually abused by her stepbrother. Although she later gained great loving support from her husband and her many followers as a successful modernist writer, her mental stability hung on a razor’s edge.

This production offers captivating performances and is brazen enough to tamper with the brilliant florid language from the original O’Brien text. The text is sometimes disjointed and the slide show on offer is minimal and  occasionally obscured by the performances. The sound and lighting (Shane Grant) is used effectively to punctuate dramatic tension and chronological time.

Flora Georgiou

Photographer: Darren Gill