Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is one of those novels that has found its way into numerous lists of important or best loved texts, as well as regularly appearing in English Literature exam syllabuses. Director Jen Heyes and performer Kit Green have collaborated to adapt the book for the stage, and have cleverly framed it very much more in the manner of informal cabaret than a narrative drama, which is very much in keeping with its conversational style.
Premiering at Storyhouse in Chester this week, with an upcoming tour to follow, it uses a ‘cine-theatre’ technique which Heyes has employed previously, combining a single onstage performance with prerecorded video, enabling Green to perform all the roles in the story.
One thing that fascinated the creators about Woolf’s text was her frequent use of the idea of Clarissa Dalloway ‘plunging’ into things. The way in which Green presents the material very much takes the form of a series of deep dives beneath the surface of each character’s world.
One moment we are being regaled by our hostess in direct address, and then suddenly we find ourselves immersed in a scene, a thought, or one of the streams of consciousness that Woolf fills her pages with. Monika Koeck’s sumptuous video washes over the walls of the stage, sometimes billowing like voile curtains, sometimes filled with flowers, and sometimes showing us the very solid architecture of London. The effect is so intoxicating that it seems that the audience almost forget to breathe during many of these passages, and it is both a shock and a release when we are just as suddenly brought back to the reality of the room.
This episodic style is at once disconcerting and disarming, and we really do feel like guests in the company of a slightly eccentric but very eager hostess.
Recorded sequences that appear in a variety of layers of projection, sometimes on screens that slide silently into view, enable a host of different characters from the novel to appear. Chief amongst these are Septimus Smith, who has survived the First World War but is now suffering post traumatic stress disorder (or ‘shell shock’ as it was known at the time) and Sally Seaton, who, in another era may well have become Clarissa’s lover, but here is relegated to a passing romance before they both marry more conventionally for the 1920s.
Something of the order of fifteen or so characters come and go, some like apparitions via the magic of video, and others simply inhabiting Green in her onstage persona, one such being the laconic maid Lucy, who proves quite a source of humour.
The really engaging thing about this adaptation is that it makes no apparent effort to form Woolf’s rambling text into any sort of coherent narrative. Instead we are buoyed along on a sea of words by Green’s beguiling personality, and find ourselves willingly sinking beneath the surface as she explores the mores of Clarissa’s social circle. Some of the things we find in these waters are amusing, some melancholy, and some quite disturbing, and the overall effect is akin to a sequence of half-remembered dreams.
Mrs Dalloway is an imaginative, kaleidoscopic piece of performance that sits somewhere between cabaret and theatre, and it is impossible not to be drawn into Clarissa’s world by Green’s arch and artful delivery.
The show runs at Chester’s Storyhouse until 6th June, before tour dates including Harlow Playhouse and Wilton’s Music Hall later in the month and three nights at Home in Manchester in September.
Star rating: 4½ stars
Production photographs by AB Photography
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