A Room of One’s Own

How the spirits of female students must have soared when they heard Virginia Woolf’s two lectures at Cambridge in 1928! Published soon after, it’s here given its third adaptation for performance. 

A Room of One’s Own is ostensibly about women in fiction, as we follow Woolf’s sharp mind and earnest sympathy unravelling millenniums of misogyny and oppressive traditions which left the world with so few female writers.

But this is no ideological declamation, rather an often moving and witty voyage through historic, human anecdote driven by Woolf’s leaps of logic, and especially so in Anita Hegh’s richly modulated performance.  Like a surgeon, she lays bare an enormous tally of wasted female writers/artists, and why that is.

Having a room of one’s own, with a lock on the door, and freedom from poverty are the basic requirements - even the Bronte Sisters and Jane Austin didn’t have that minimum. Woolf’s humanity and storytelling prowess have been retained in this adaptation by director Carrissa Licciardello and Tom Wright.   But still she launches into fabulous flight arguing for the modern writer to combine both male and female, into what Coleridge called an androgenous mind.

Licciardello and designer David Fleischer sometimes pause the monologue with actor Ella Prince in short illustrative mimes and tableaus inside an onstage glass room, some profound, some obscure.  And Paul Charlier’s sound adds further punctuation.  Anita Hegh takes us on a compelling, richly articulate voyage.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman