"sparkling with wit...masterly"

September 25, 2004 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Vita and Virginia, now playing at Shakespeare and Co’s Springlawn Theatre has been so developed and enhanced since its 2003 run (which I found delightful) that even more windows have been opened on the magnetic and enigmatic relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

The dialog remains the same, sparkling with wit, challenge, and careful circling of territory, and since every word was written by two of the most famous British fiction writers of the Modernist period (lovingly culled by Eileen Atkins from letters and diaries) it is masterly.

We never see the two women writing, however. They act and react as they circle each other in a tentative and then widening mating dance in which each seeks in the other what her own life lacks.

Both actors, Tod Randolph as Virginia and Catherine Taylor-Williams as Vita, have grown in vitality, vehemence and poignancy, and out-distance their former creations.. Under Dan McCleary’s able direction, they have taken on a feisty, loving and combative relationship, giving their exchanges dimensions that intensify their verbal exchanges.

Virginia may be dowdy in dress and feel old compared to Vita, ten years younger, but she is shrewd and except for the awful periods in which her mind leaves her, is highly intelligent. (And even in her periods of insanity, nightingales sing in Greek). She may be drawn to flamboyant passion of Vita, but knows her to be the lesser artist. And she also may sense in Vita the ability to love her as tenderly as the mother she lost at thirteen.

Vita literally embodies her name, Life. She is so vital, spirited, so agilely flings herself into the landscapes she inhabits that she is a fire of energy that no moth can resist. She admires Virginia’s superior skills (although her own quickly dashed off novels sell far better than Virginia’s ) and when she makes first contact with her, boasts to her husband of the big white fish she has landed.

Totally different, they are irresistibly fascinated with each other. As Virginia points out, “If you make me up, I shall make you up.” During the course of the play each does. Neither could become the other or even possess the other as they wished, but in subtle ways they empower each other.

What these two actors have achieved in living with their characters is dazzling and bewitching. At first one is startled by Virginia’s independent spirit. When Vita, making the opening advance invites her to become a member of Pen, Virginia declines, but offers Vita the opportunity to be published by the Hogarth Press which she and her husband run. She thus keeps her distance and adds a best selling author to her firm’s list.

She will keep her distance, warily, for some time, but will gradually be drawn into admiration for Vita’s flamboyant zest for life, her dazzling descriptions of her travels, and her ability to dash off a books with apparent ease. She will also sense that in Vita there is a tenderness.

And it is strongly there. Vita in her pursuit of Viginia, will worry lest too ardent wooing could tip Virginia into retreat as serious as madness. She circles the relationship with great care.

The distance between them, the great difference in their personalities is literally presented in a brief exchange when, separated by the width of the stage, Vita, arms flinging in wild abandon, describes a flaming train ride, and Virginia, countering, remarks on the peace of a lovely, bird haunted, spring day, and wittily points out that the royalties from Vita’s book have empowered the Hogarth and Vita will be delighted to know that two new water closets have been dedicated in her name.

Their lesbian relationship is in this staging of the play, portrayed more explicitly than one remembers from the previous production, but tastefully and briefly. Their needs for each other are far deeper than physicality.

And there are gaps in the intimacy, nurtured by Virginia’s resentment over Vita’s other loves, but she fights back, writing Orlando, a biographical love letter, but one in which she dares to kill the hero in the end.

The fears and terrors of WWII bring them together again, and briefly bring the sirens and bombing planes into theatre itself. And out of the terror and despair, Virginia’s suicide is staged, simply as she stands behind a lit scrim, her face to the heavens from which the terror falls.

The play ends with Vita’s reading the poem she has reset from the prose of Orlando, and Virginia, stepping from behind the scrim, to join in its recital. It is a moving moment of union and sums up the relationship these two women achieved and which these two actors have recreated for us.

        Let us go then, exploring
        This summer morning.
        When all are adoring
        The plum-blossom and the bee.
        And humming and hawing
        Let us ask of the starling
        What he may think
        On the brink
        Of the dust-bin whence he pricks
        Among the sticks
        Combings of scullion’s hair.
        What’s life, we ask;
        Life, Life, Life! cries the bird
        As if he had heard...

Virginia knew both Latin and Greek, and the bird cry, translated, becomes Vita, Vita, Vita!.....Virginia’s way of summing up the enormous value of the relationship.

This is a remarkable play and admirably produced. Go.