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I went to see this play out of my interest in the centenary commemorations of two important phases in twentieth-century Britain: firstly, the end of the “Great War” and secondly, the Act of Parliament that gave women the right to vote. A play based on the work of the feminist writer, Virginia Woolf, set in London in 1925, seemed an interesting contribution to my thoughts.
When I first arrived, I wondered if the spare, brick-faced basement of the Arcola's Studio 2 would be an effective setting for a play set in the 1920s. (In fact, I wondered if the play itself would be of interest to the residents of Dalston.) But in the event, the feeling of being in a bunker or a cellar, where old structures were re-purposed while retaining their former resonances, seemed appropriate for the play. There is a quality to the sparsely staged performance that speaks to Woolf's original text; we are not carried away by dinner party chatter or by the clutter of “things”, and we are not offered the false comfort of answers, encounters, or other expected representations. I enjoyed the raising of anxiety that ensued, echoing the inescapability of our inner world concerns.
This stage adaption by Hal Coase of the novel, Mrs Dalloway, with a running time of one hour and forty minutes, needed to be a slightly different creature from Woolf's original novel. The programme tells me that sixteen actors originally performed this particular adaption in 2017. So in this five-handed performance we were, to some degree, seeing a further adaption. The performance begins in what could be described as “workshop style” for the first few minutes, with actors talking to the audience and to each other, setting out the questions that are fundamental themes of the play, such as: “What is the nature of ‘character’?” “How can we know the other?” “How can we know the self?” “Therefore, how can we judge a character?” “Do such necessary judgements constrain us?”
Following the novel, the central character is Mrs Dallowa