Watching Rebecca Vaughan perform the one-woman show Dalloway, based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, I admired the skill that had gone into adapting such a complex and rambling novel into a stage show lasting less than an hour and a half.
Every character seems to be represented, or at least mentioned, as Vaughan takes us through Clarissa Dalloway's day from her famous decision to buy the flowers herself to the successful party she throws in the evening.
There is never a moment's confusion as to who is speaking: Clarissa, warm and generous but troubled by thoughts of her own mortality; one-time beau Peter Walsh, unsettled and insecure in middle age; ghastly, aggressively bitter Miss Kilman; tragically shell-shocked Septimus Smith, who fells nothing and everything; or any of the dozen or so other characters.
Vaughan's performance at first seems overpowering, possibly because the production has been developed for larger and less intimate venues than the Fortune Studio, but very soon good rapport between performer and audience are established.
Wearing a green tea-dress and with few props other than a chaise longue, she convincingly brings London in the early 1920s to life, revealing a world which, although recognisable, has conventions very different from our own.
Whether she's being capable and sympathetic as Clarissa, shockingly pompous as Hugh Whitbread, or almost grotesque as Lady Bruton, she inhabits her characters completely.
The play emphasises its characters' inner turmoil rather than their exterior poise, producing an intensity that at times seems out of tune with the novel's comparative calm, but is also an effective way of representing Woolf's interior worlds on stage.
Written and directed by Elton Townend Jones and produced by Dyad Productions in the UK, the show is part the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival, and will close on Sunday.
- Barbara Frame
Dalloway
Fortune Theatre Studio
Friday, May 8
