| . | 02/01/2009
Freshwater
By: Victor Gluck
Stephen Duff Webber as Tennyson and Ellen Lauren as Julia Margaret Cameron
(Photo credit: Carol Rosegg)
On the evening of Friday, January 18, 1935, novelist Virginia Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, invited 80 members of their family and friends to witness an amateur production of Woolf’s only play entitled Freshwater, a comedy, at Bell’s studio at 8 Fitzroy Street in London.
This parody of the late Victorian artist colony surrounding their great aunt, the famed photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, at her home in the Freshwater section of the Isle of Wight was performed by some of the most famous members of the Bloomsbury Group: editor Leonard Woolf (Woolf’s husband), artist Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell herself as their great aunt Julia, as well as members of their immediate family such as their brother Adrian. The event also celebrated the 16th birthday of Bell’s daughter Angelica who appeared as actress Ellen Terry at the same age. According to Woolf’s diary, the performance was an “unbuttoned laughing evening” and thoroughly enjoyed by all.
First published in the United States in 1976, Freshwater has not had a professional American production until now. The Women’s Project and SITI Company have joined forces to mount this U.S. professional premiere. This comedy offers built-in difficulties as its characters, once famous as eccentrics and known to its first audience at least by reputation, are today only names in the encyclopedia. It also includes many in-jokes known only to literary scholars today.
Although director Anne Bogart, artistic director of the SITI Company, has suggested an amateur theatrical by adding such gimmicks as the maid counting the house, a curtain made up of motley quilts, and a song by one of the cast at the beginning of the show, she has attempted a send-up of a parody. As a result she fails to get the laughs she seeks, and what should have been a comic romp falls flat. Freshwater remains a literary footnote as the only stage play of famed novelist Virginia Woolf.
Set in Dimbola, Cameron’s home on the Isle of Wight and next door to the estate of the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Freshwater recreates the eccentric circle of artists who surrounded her: Charles Hay Cameron, the philosopher and Julia’s husband; the middle-aged painter George Frederick Watts and his 16-year-old child bride, the future actress Ellen Terry; the poet Tennyson, a frequent visitor; and Julia’s maid Mary Hillier, nicknamed “Madonna” for posing so often for Cameron’s photographs in that role and who later married a peer of the realm.
Woolf’s play combines a number of events that did not take place at the same time: Watts and Terry separating in 1865 when she eloped with another man, the Camerons leaving England in 1875 for the Middle East where the family had an estate, and Tennyson being awarded a peerage by Queen Victoria in 1884. All the characters are historically accurate except for the fictional Lt. John Craig (referred to in the play as “a Fact”) who woos Terry. Even this, however, was an in-joke: Terry’s two children with Edward Goodwin with whom she lived briefly after leaving Watts took the legal last name of Craig. Another plot device in the text is that in the third act, the other characters believe Ellen to have been drowned. This is inspired by her leaving a note of two words on a photograph of Watts when she ran off with Goodwin: “Found drowned.”
Bogart’s 65-minute script combines dialogue from both the extant 1923 and 1935 versions of Woolf’s text. As the play begins, Watts paints Ellen dressed as “Modesty at the feet of Mammon” and the Camerons await their coffins (without which they would not leave for their planned trip to the Middle East) while Tennyson reads aloud from his poem Maud. When Julia desires a pair of wings in which to photograph Ellen, she runs after the household turkey. Lt. John Craig, on leave from his navy ship in the harbor, gets a note to the bored Ellen to meet him at the garden gate; a parody of the most often quoted line in Maud. The play concludes with the departure of the Camerons for India (in real life Ceylon) as well as Ellen and Craig’s elopement, just as Queen Victoria arrives to pay a visit on Watts and Tennyson.
Bogart has added all kinds of farcical stage business to a text which has almost no stage directions. Unfortunately such gimmicks as Cameron mooning the audience, Julia climbing up a ladder so that all we see is her rump as she flings clothes on to the stage, Mary playing gramophone records, and characters entering and exiting through the picture window fails to elicit laughter. The production never achieves the right style or rhythm needed for a successful farce.
The historic characters are all played as one-dimensional stereotypes: Ellen Lauren’s Julia represents authority; Tom Nelis’ Cameron, senility; Stephen Duff Webber’s Tennyson, pomposity. The casting of the mature Kelly Maurer as the 16 year old Ellen Terry undercuts the text’s intended comic possibilities for an ingénue. As the dashing Lt. John Craig, Gian Murray Gianino as the only sane character in the play never takes the audience into his confidence and seems rather stiff as the Sir Galahad figure come to rescue the maiden in distress.
James Schuette’s colorful studio set is often too surreal for what is already a Monty Python-esque situation, while his costumes miss the opportunity to capitalize on the characters’ fabled eccentricities. For example, Julia is described in the 1923 version as dressed like a gypsy, but Schuette dresses her in a very conventional red Victorian gown. Although Darron L. West’s sound design is intended to provoke laughter from the audience quoting such inappropriate melodies as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on the soundtrack, it falls short of its intended goal. Brian H. Scott has bathed the set in bright light throughout the play’s three acts. On the other hand, the hair and wig design by Anne Ford-Coates successfully evokes the Victorian spirit.
Virginia Woolf’s fans will want to see her only play but will not recognize the author of Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, or To the Lighthouse. As a comic romp written for one artistic community to parody an earlier one, this first New York production of Freshwater is sorely lacking. Comedy, as we all know, is serious business.
Freshwater (through February 15)
Julia Miles Theatre, 424 W. 55th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or http://www.Telecharge.com
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