Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Vanessa
and
Virginia
Riverside
Studios
Spring 2013
Translating the lives of real people into the medium of fiction is always a challenge, but Moving Pictures’ Vanessa and Virginia is something even further removed – a play that is itself adapted from the Susan Sellers novel of the same name.
Perhaps it is this extra distance from the real lives of
Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, that makes the play feel so
distilled, so distant from the lives of these fascinating women.
Much of the play takes the form of a monologue spoken by Vanessa, who
survived her sister by twenty years, and via reams of short scenes we
are shown their entire shared lives, from the nursery room up to
Virginia’s suicide in 1941.
Kitty Randle struggles with Vanessa’s upper class vowels
and has a tendency towards melodrama, though she is nicely balanced by a
generally more restrained performance from Alice Frankham as Woolf.
Though undoubtedly the more famous of the two, this is a version of
Woolf as seen through the prism of a shared childhood and a co-dependent
adulthood – she hovers at the edges of everything Vanessa thinks and
says and does, but her inner life is necessarily unknowable.
All this means that we skate around the edges of Woolf’s mental ill
health as around an iceberg, seeing only glimpses, but aware of its
vastness. It is a relief that they touch on it so little: what we see is
strangely pat and shorthand, as if because this element of her life is
so famous that Moving Pictures feel they need not try to examine it with
any originality.
It is ironic to have Frankham, as Woolf, complain wittily and
articulately about Shakespeare's women in one breath, only to depict her
madness as something so Ophelia-esque in the next, comprised of
ramblings and sudden shrieks. To look so whimsically at the illness that
destroyed her feels almost insulting.
This is the problem with much of Vanessa
and Virginia: though well-intentioned
and occasionally moving, the whole thing is painted with too thick a
brush to have any real subtlety. One could guess this from the moment
one enters the theatre and sees Kate Unwin’s set: though beautiful to
look at and inventively used, it is essentially a large paint-splattered
canvas, edged by discarded pages, just in case one hadn’t realised that
the play is about an artist and an author.
If the audience don’t know even this much, they will soon be thoroughly
lost, as an assumed knowledge of constantly name-checked bit-players
will make Vanessa and Virginia feel impenetrable to those with little knowledge of the
period.
Existing fans will know enough to keep up, but are likely to be disappointed by a play that is trying to pack in every little thing – inevitably, in trying to do so much, Vanessa and Virginia achieves disappointingly little.
Lauren Mooney
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Review - Vanessa and Virginia - Riverside Studios 2013