Review: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, on stage at Belvoir

Anita Hegh takes the audience on a theatrical journey of thought in a superb adaptation of Woolf’s feminist text.

Anita Hegh in A Room Of One's Own, at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre. Picture: Brett Boardman.

Back in the theatre, after six months, still physically distanced, masked, but all together in the same room again — what a pleasure. Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack, welcoming us on Wednesday night, said: “I never thought I’d be so pleased to see the theatre a third full.”

The occasion is the much delayed opening of Carissa Licciardello and Tom Wright’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s great work, A Room of One’s Own. The text is trimmed, as it must be, but Licciardello’s production captures the formal adventurousness, the thoughtful anger and the celebration of lived experience of the original. With design by David Fleischer and Kelsey Lee and composition and sound by Alice Chance and Paul Charlier the show captures beautifully but subtly the journey of thought and experience that Woolf took us on. It is a superb text for performance.

Anita Hegh delivers it with restraint and clarity but also with the sudden outbursts of emotion and wit that characterise Woolf’s writing. It seems at first like a lecture, which was how the essay began, but there is soon revealed on stage a clear box in which Ella Prince performs a series of tableaus that provide the context. These are images of the women that Woolf, in her persona as the narrator Mary, refers to as she recounts the progress of her thoughts — by a river with willows, a library from which she is excluded, and through the streets of London — about the topic she is addressing to an audience of young women: women and fiction.

Most famously, of course, she said that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. But she spun that simple, obvious material point out into a complex meditation on the space that women’s voices may or may not be allowed, including by themselves, to occupy. She speculated that in 100 years (her essay was written in 1928) a lot of what she was saying would be out of date. This production, especially in the changing figure played by Prince, suggests that in some ways it is but that in other ways there is still a long way to go.

One of Woolf’s ideas, based on a line by Coleridge, was that all great writers are in some sense androgynous — that it was fatal to creativity to be a man or a woman pure and simple. “One must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”

She also, presciently, imagined the discovery of other sexes, other than the binary that she was observing in her own time. Well, we have them now.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Adapted by Carissa Licciardello and Tom Wright. Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, September 16. Tickets: $61-$84. Bookings: [phone] or online. Duration: 90min, no interval. Until October 18.