| . | 04/20/2008
Vita and Virginia
By: Victor Gluck
Kathleen Chalfant as Virginia Woolf and Patricia Elliott as Vita Sackville-West
(photo credit: Carol Rosegg)
British writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West were among the most famous prose stylists of the 20th century. They first met at the Bloomsbury home of Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, in 1922, and became fast friends, sometime lovers and regular correspondents, until Woolf’s death in 1941. Eileen Atkins’ adaptation of their correspondence, Vita & Virginia, is having its first New York revival since the original 1994 production with Vanessa Redgrave and Atkins herself. The No Frills Company revival stars Kathleen Chalfant as Virginia Woolf and Patricia Elliott as Vita Sackville-West, two consummate actresses who make this a very elegant, though erudite evening.
Vita & Virginia is a play about language, and what voluptuous language it is as might be expected from two writers who were particularly interested in the process of creation. Although the two actresses read from the letters, this is very much a play. The selections have been chosen to seem like a continuing conversation. Both actresses are so well prepared that they hardly ever look down at their texts. Chalfant and Elliott, like the two authors, make a dramatic study in contrasts. Chalfant’s Woolf, dressed entirely in blue, is crisp, brilliant, ironic, delicate, manic-depressive, dowdy, cerebral. Elliott accoutered in Sackville-West’s favorite outfit of red velvet with a string of long pearls is aristocratic, a descendant of a famous family, a social butterfly, a world traveler, poetic, animated, catty, passionate.
At their first meeting, Woolf, who was to become the most influential woman writer of the 20th century, had not yet written Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Sackville-West was later to write the novels The Edwardians and Challenge, based on her affair with Violet Trefusis, (documented in Portrait of a Marriage by Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson,) and the book length poem, The Land, for which she won the Hawthornden Prize. The main character of Woolf’s best-selling 1928 novel Orlando was partly based on Sackville-West, to Vita’s amazement and delight.
Woolf and Sackville-West write to each other of books they were writing and social engagements. Their letters are peppered with such names as writers T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dame Edith Sitwell. Woolf is jealous of Sackville-West’s friendships with society hostess Lady Sibyl Colefax, Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department, Mary Campbell, wife of the poet Roy Campbell, and Trefusis. Woolf writes from her homes in Bloomsbury’s Tavistock Square and her country house, Rodmell, in Sussex, while Sackville-West writes from her ancestral home of Knole, and Sissinghurst Castle, famously restored by herself and her husband Harold Nicolson.
Virginia speaks of the Hogarth Press, founded by herself and her husband Leonard Woolf. Married to a diplomat, Vita recounts her travels from China, to Egypt, to Persia: a fire on a train, dinner with the King of the Afghans, etc. The friends plan a trip to France and find themselves in Paris together. The darkening world situation intrudes on their lives as the giddy twenties become the fascist thirties: the Spanish Civil War and eventually the bombing of London. Virginia’s headaches increase as her bouts of illness slow down her ability to write. Pamela Berlin’s direction is silken smooth and she obtains both humor and pathos from her actresses.
Vita & Virginia is a very specialized evening, “caviar to the general” as Hamlet would say. For the sophisticated theatergoer, it is an exquisite evening of language and emotions. You couldn’t do better than to put yourself into the hands of such accomplished performers as Kathleen Chalfant and Patricia Elliott for the two hour duration of this play.
Vita and Virginia (Mondays through April 28)
Zipper Factory Theater, 336 W. 37th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or http://www.thezipperfactory.com
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