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The Poetry of Language
By Shel Horowitz
With its only characters two of Britain's greatest woman writers of the 20th century, and with dialogue taken largely from their voluminous correspondence, it's not surprising that "Vita & Virginia" is a love-fest for the English language.
The sculpted elegance of the words themselves made the content almost irrelevant; it was enough to enjoy the poetry of it all.
Chronicling the decades-long friendship of Vita Sackville-West (Catherine Taylor-Williams) and Virginia Woolf (Tod Randolph), the play opens with a flamboyant entrance by Sackville-West, strutting in her suede suit and doing an animated half-pirouette--and a much more subdued entrance by Woolf, dressed in a dowdy frock. Each woman begins with a letter to a friend, chronicling their sharply different perspectives on their first encounter, at a party.
Woolf broods on what it means to be, as Sackville-West is, part of the aristocracy and a lover of women.
Sackville-West comments quite a bit on Woolf's "atrocious" taste in fashion, her amazing literary talents, and whether the two will build a friendship. She is thrilled when Woolf invites her to submit a story to her press.
The relationship is a while getting started, and the script's pace is deliberately slow. Two steps forward, one step back, and gradually, the two grow closer. Early on, Woolf writes, "your intimate letter gave me a great deal of pain, which is the first step to intimacy." And then the two go back and forth, discussing the remark of Sackville-West's that caused the pain, and each denying she meant to hurt the other.
Meanwhile, infatuated with Woolf, Sackville-West keeps finding excuses to walk in the Woolfs' country neighborhood, but only tells Virginia that she's been 'round from the safety and comfort of her London apartment, after the fact.
But they get past this and many other conflicts. When she receives Woolf's praise of the story she submits, Sackville-West "felt like a stroked cat." And when a critic tears down one of Sackville-West's works, Woolf consolers her with her opinion that the critic "doesn't know a poem form a potato."
Through their becoming lovers, through Virginia's growing bouts of depression and jealousy--Sackville-West had a large stable of female lovers; Woolf seems, from this play, to have only her husband Leonard--the admiration for each other's gifts of language--and each writer's struggle to be satisfied with her own work--is consistent. After reading To The Lighthouse, Vita wonders, "How did you walk along that razor edge without falling?" But of her own novel in progress, "I'd rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed."
But Virgina responds to a later round of praise, "I assure you all my words were first-rate--before they were written!"
Yet, while they are deeply devoted fans, there's quite a bit of tension in their views of each other's writing: a mutual struggle to be actually understood by each other, in letters and in books.
Although she loves Orlando, which Virginia modeled on their own relationship, she resists Virgnia's constant tendency to make her something she's not: "I won't be fictitious! I won't be [only] in an astral body."
A full decade later, Vita reads Three Guineas and comments, "[You] entice one with your lovely prose and exasperate one with your misleading arguments." After asking for clarification, Virginia responds furiously, "I don't agree that it's a well-written book, but it's certainly an honest one."
The Virginia Woolf of this play is far more complex--and fascinating--than Nicole Kidman's Woolf in "The Hours." We see her much more in relation to her outside world. It's a world less glamorous than Sackville-West's, who accompanies her diplomat husband on extended postings to Teheran, Berlin, Egypt, and elsewhere, and whose wild extraversion is well-suited to the glitterati life. But we see Woolf's concern about the rise of fascism, her grief when her nephew is killed, and her joy in getting a new stove. "I have only one passion: cooking...I am free forever of cooks."
Shel Horowitz is the Editor of Global Arts Review and author of the e-book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First (available at https://www.frugalfun.com)
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Love Letters: The Amorous correspondence of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West is Dramatized at Shakespeare & Company
Reviewed by Chris Rohmann
Shortly after she and Vita Sackville-West began their lesbian affair, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, �She shines with a candle-lit radiance, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung.�
Those delicious images marked a sensual awakening for the author, a kind of feeling rarely shared by Edwardian husbands and wives. �These Sapphists,� Woolf marveled, �love women. Friendship is never untinged with amorosity.�
So began the on-again, off-again physical relationship that laced the two women�s nearly 20-year friendship, from the early 1920s until 1941, when Woolf committed suicide. They wrote to each other frequently, because they saw each other comparatively rarely. They traveled in different social circles, lived much of the time in different countries (Sackville-West�s husband was a diplomat in the British Foreign Service), and both were married—happily married—to men who were more or less willing to overlook their wives� extramarital adventures.
Their letters, with some diary entries and other writings, were compiled into a compelling play by the English actress Eileen Atkins. The cleverly arranged excerpts form a conversation that covers not only Vita and Virginia�s personal interactions but much of their literary biography too. Indeed, much of the relationship is revealed in the women�s responses to reading each other�s books. They were both well-known writers—Sackville-West, not Woolf, the more commercially successful of the two.
Vita uses the same terms—�dazzled and bewitched�—to express her admiration for Woolf�s novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando. The latter, which has been called �the longest and most charming love letter in literature,� is a pseudo-biography whose title character—a man who doesn�t age but instead morphs into a woman—is a fantasy of Vita. (When Vita reads it she tells Virginia, �You have invented a new form of narcissism ... I confess, I am in love with Orlando.)
In contrast to Vita�s rapturous admiration of Virginia�s work, Virginia gives faint praise to her friend�s poetry and prose. Sackville-West clung to conventional literary forms, even when her work explored the unconventional landscape of lesbian love, while Woolf was changing the landscape of 20th-century fiction. And though Sackville-West�s predictable accessibility made her the more popular writer in their day, she is largely remembered as a footnote to Woolf.
Tod Randolph and Catherine Taylor-Williams embody these two contrasting women wonderfully—Virginia the repressed (and depressed) middle-class intellectual (Vita tells her, �You like people better through their brains than through their hearts�) and Vita the headstrong faux-bohemian aristocrat. Jennifer Halpern�s costumes convey their distinct tastes and priorities, Virginia satisfied with a dowdy print dress, then a plain blouse and skirt, while Vita struts in a fashionable brown-and-beige outfit that gives way to a Sherwood Forest green belted jacket, jodhpurs and boots.
Randolph actually looks more than a bit like Virginia, right down to the aquiline nose and the steely gaze. Taylor-Williams doesn�t look much like Sackville-West at all, but she does look like Orlando, at least as portrayed by Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter�s 1993 movie—the same porcelain skin, auburn hair and lanky frame.
I�m told the original production, which starred Atkins and Vanessa Redgrave, was performed as a reading, the two performers standing at lecterns. Dan McCleary�s staging, in Shakespeare & Company�s Spring Lawn mansion, turns the conversation into a full-blooded relationship. In Spring Lawn�s fittingly Edwardian drawing room, he turns the ladies loose to move, interact, touch.
And touch they do. Here, that first coming together is not just recalled, it�s reenacted—Virginia at first shy and fearful as Vita crawls onto her like a stalking cat, tempting her to a tentative kiss, then a deeper one. Taylor-Williams is voluptuously seductive in this moment, and Randolph is touching as Virginia�s hesitancy slowly surrenders to passion.
While Vita is the more uninhibited of the pair, it�s Virginia who, for all her reticence, falls more deeply into the relationship. Taylor-Williams is a flirtatious Vita, slightly predatory and a bit cool. Of course, she�s the experienced lesbian who has had previous alliances with women—and one grand passion—and who dallies with two or three other women during the time of her friendship with Virginia. It�s also Virginia who betrays the most emotion, lashing out in hurt anger not just at her lover�s promiscuity but also at Vita�s rare criticism of one of her books, the antiwar tract Three Guineas.
The women�s difference not only in temperament but in class backgrounds, politics and world views is reflected in �Vita and Virginia,� but only partially. Woolf was a socialist and egalitarian, while Sackville-West was quite the aristocratic snob. Her early novels were idylls of a rural utopia peopled with condescending caricatures of the lower classes, and she railed against the early manifestations of the British welfare state. The audience doesn�t know this from the script, but the actress does, and Taylor-Williams plays Vita as a charming but rather arch patrician.
Taylor-Williams is superb in her role, but Randolph is brilliant. Her performance is nuanced with constantly shifting fields of light and shadow. We see and feel the woman�s crisp intelligence, her sharp humor, and the daggers of despair that tormented her with chronic headaches and finally drove her to fill her pockets with stones and walk into the River Ouse.
Together, these well-matched, richly talented women bring the written word to life. �Vita and Virginia� is a literary delight and a theatrical experience to treasure.
Shel Horowitz, Editor of Global Travel Review and owner of FrugalFun.com, is the author of the e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant's Pocketbook, and the creator of the Ethical Business Pledge campaign.
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