Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel about a day in the life (and life in the day) of Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society wife in postwar London, is not an easy story to adapt for the stage. It jumps from past to present and from one character’s stream-of-consciousness to another.
The writer Hal Coase meets Woolf’s experimentalism with his own. In the first scene, actors appear in costume but out of character. “I live in London,” says one. “I’m terrified,” says another. They speak about Woolf’s 1924 essay on the primacy of character, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, and quibble about how the play should begin; stopping, starting, and narrating their lines from a lectern to stall our suspension of disbelief. The complications of staging an adaptation are exposed, but it all feels awkward and overplayed.
Actors talk to each other but also speak their thoughts into a handheld recorder in a modern version of the theatrical aside. Sometimes they speak in unison as if a chorus; a single scene contains multiple time and place perspectives, jumping from London to Milan in one moment, and from past to present. The book’s magnificent vistas of London are not presented visually – a white curtain is drawn to reveal a small blue board that symbolises a clear blue sky – but described instead in imaginary word-paintings.
Many of these experiments don’t work, but Coase’s endeavour should be commended for its creative risk-taking. The five-strong cast perform the parts of more than 20 characters: Clare Perkins plays Clarissa with authority while Guy Rhys inhabits the haunted figure of Septimus Smith, a first world war veteran suffering from shell-shock through which Woolf played out elements of her own psychosis. Clare Lawrence Moody is a particularly strong presence (as Clarissa’s friend, Sally, and tutor, Doris Kilman, among others). Ultimately, though, their multiple voices and personas create a confused cacophony rather than a polyphonic orchestra of inner and outer worlds.
Occasionally Thomas Bailey’s production comes together, such as in Clarissa’s party at the end, which is staged as a press conference and filled with spirited social satire. Such scenes have a bold, brave clarity of vision, but they are too few and far between.
At the Arcola, London, until 20 October.
