EDINBURGH 2023: Review: VITA AND VIRGINIA (ABRIDGED), TheSpace @ Niddry St

“I absolutely adore Virginia Woolf,” exclaims Vita Sackville-West as soon as the lights come on. It’s the Roaring Twenties; they met at a party the night before, started speaking, and never stopped until Woolf’s demise in 1941. Abridged from Eileen Atkins’s play, the two-hander shows the visceral longing shared by the pair. With strands of personal letters and diary entries, they cross the thin lines between admiration, affection, and attraction.

Both married to men, their “friendship” was defined by jealousy, insecurity, and a vibrant need to claim the other’s attention - especially on Woolf’s side. Directed by Richard Delahaye and starring Emma Francis as Vita and Ruth Cattell as Virginia, it’s a wondrous exploration of the epistolary side of their near-romance.

The actors speak frontally, never looking at one another, yet there’s a crackling chemistry running between them. Francis is proud, bordering on arrogant as the feisty traveller and haughty society woman, while Cattell introduces a wise and witty Virginia, prone to controlled explosions of passion and rage in a subtle, quietly intense performance.

They delight in poking and teasing each other in a playful push-and-pull that conceals the shackles of the societal demands they face. Unsurprisingly, the production is built on a fine appreciation of language and character. Woolf’s beautiful descriptions of Sackville-West sit side by side with the latter’s blasé recollections of her travels. 

Composed feelings leave spaces for sudden displays of written resentment as the unofficial couple run headfirst into an ending we all know too well. It’s a tender, relentlessly magnetic piece of Sapphic theatre. 

Vita and Virginia (Abridged) runs at theSpace @ Niddry St until 12 August.

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