Heather Alexander brought her one-woman show Room to Rye as part of the arts festival. It was a spellbinding adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 polemic A Room of One’s Own.
The set is one room cleverly divided into different areas with a piano stool, two chairs each side and a desk cluttered with books and fine wine. Heather uses these props to set the scene and we are transported to all the key venues of Virginia Woolf’s life. Music plays an important part of the dialogue and punctuates Woolf’s thoughts.
It was a poignant, exquisite performance and the eighty minutes of the show just slipped by.
Heather explores Woolf’s fundamental ideas about creativity, gender and opportunities lost. She is witty and provocative and deeply thought-provoking and the audience loved the show, many thanking Heather for her amazing performance as she left.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is considered one of the most important English modernist writers of the early 20th. century, in particular pioneering the use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative device in novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando. A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, was one of her best-known essays and has provided inspiration for the feminist movement for decades.
Image Credits: Kt bruce .