Vita & Virginia

Posted by Martina Birk on Monday, May 13, 2024

Vita

Vita

Sackville-West … Vanessa Redgrave

Virginia Woolf … Eileen Atkins

Yes, they could read a phone book and enchant an audience, and for all the dramatic thrust in their material here Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins might as well be doing just that. “Vita & Virginia,” a two-character play adapted by Atkins from the letters of Brit-lit femme fatales Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, is a slow-going affair enamored of, but only intermittently enlivened by, voices.

Specifically, four voices: Those of Vita, Virginia, Vanessa and Eileen. And unquestionably terrific voices they are. Trading heady bon mots, passionate declarations of love and brittle, clever observations on post-Victorian society, Redgrave and Atkins clearly are enjoying themselves.

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Their stagecraft and charisma are nearly enough — but only nearly — to float “Vita & Virginia” through a stagnant 2 1/2 hours.

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The recitation begins with Woolf, 40 years old and a tad frumpish, being pursued via correspondence by Sackville-West, a known “Sapphist” 10 years her junior and the image of patrician chic.

Over the next 20 years the two will engage in a romantic and passionate affair — mostly, if the play is correct, through the mails — that evolves into a deep friendship and ends only with Woolf’s suicide in 1941 (abruptly introduced to close the play).

As would be expected, their letters involve considerable book chat (Sackville-West was the inspiration for Woolf’s “Orlando”), asides on the rarefied social and intellectual circles to which the women belonged, aphorisms (“I would rather gloriously fail than dingily succeed,” writes Vita) and much mutual admiration.

The relationship between Vita and Virginia, though, was not purely, or even perhaps primarily, intellectual, and their correspondence charts the course of a relationship that proves all too commonplace in its sentimentality.

From infatuation and love through petty jealousies, affairs and, finally, a sort of resigned devotion, the relationship, as depicted here, would indicate nothing so much as the notion that even literary geniuses can be tiresome and banal off the page.

“Oh dear,” Vita coos, “how I love you. I just want to talk and talk and talk.”

Suffice it to say, Sackville-West is well-served having someone as magnetic as Redgrave doing all of her talking and talking and talking.

And Atkins is every bit Redgrave’s match, presenting a Woolf whose fierce intelligence and pride is never muffled by the melancholy and self-doubt that would eventually push her into the River Ouse.

Her incisiveness cuts right through Sackville-West’s dilettante pretensions, even if her brooding is cowed by Vita’s joie de vivre.

For Atkins, the play marks a return to Woolf. Several seasons back the actress starred in the one-woman “A Room of One’s Own,” a portrait of Woolf as compelling as “Vita & Virginia” is immobile.

Where the earlier production carried the audience along the breakneck course of Woolf’s intellectual processes, “V&V” goes nowhere.

In addition to the performances, though, Zoe Caldwell’s direction provides some momentum. Caldwell has the characters alternately interacting with one another and reciting their correspondence as monologues.

The approach can be disconcerting at times, but it gives the production a texture that the overlong play itself lacks.

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Vita & Virginia

(Union Square Theater, N.Y.; 499 seats; $ 45 top)

  • Production: A Lewis Allen, Robert Fox Ltd., Julian Schlossberg presentation, with Mitchell Maxwell and Alan J. Schuster, of a play in two acts, adapted by Eileen Atkins from the correspondence between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Directed by Zoe Caldwell.
  • Crew: Sets, Ben Edwards; costumes, Jane Greenwood; lights, Rui Rita; original music and sound, John Gromada; production stage manager, Dianne Trulock. Opened Nov. 21, 1994; reviewed Nov. 18. Running time: 2 hours, 30 min.

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