“We are only just beginning our journey……..”

“We are only just beginning our journey……..”
So we have now done three performances of ‘Vanessa and Virginia’ and it now feels so long since those days in the summer when Sarah and myself would, the evening before or in the morning of rehearsals, try to prepare as best we could by learning the lines of the units to be tackled that day. The time when I just couldn’t get my mouth around lines like “even Father appears released from the relentless burden of his work that oppresses him in London”. But as the research, rehearsal conversations, improvisations and tackling with the details developed and deepened, I connected myself more with the stories of these sisters and Vanessa and the lines started to settle. Then there was the battles with getting the correct sound of the words and RP took over my Northern habits, and I found myself trying to slip in words like butchers, butterflies and aunts into everyday conversations to get in the pronunciation practice.

When the rehearsals reached that point when an audience was needed we headed for Aix (although flights caused a slight delay to our arrival) and our premiere performance of the play in front of mainly Virginia Woolf scholars. With very little tech time and problems flung against George our technician, who did a brilliant job of making it possible for the show to have all the technical aspects needed, the first ever performance of ‘Vanessa and Virginia’ went up.

I can honestly say I have never felt so nervous before a performance. It was a different kind of nerves, maybe due to the problems we had encountered in getting to Aix and little tech time, the fact we would be performing to people who knew the life stories of the sisters or the weight and size of the play that Sarah and me had to now share with an audience. My fears and nerves were put in their rightful place as Emma took us through a warm up that grounded us as actors and also grounded us within the characters and their relationship. We spoke aloud our characters thoughts and feelings to one and other and again played within our world. Before going on I grounded myself in the work we had done to this point and also trusting in the remarkable stories of these women.

In Aix the play took on new heights – energetically, emotionally, physically and I found a new connection as I communicated directly to the audience.

After Aix we had weeks of time to wait till we next performed. During our notes from the first performance Emma asked us what was it we needed to do to keep the new found elements of the play and all the work fresh and not forgotten before our next performance. For myself emotionally through the first performance things had started to shift and I felt more physically connected to certain moments. In my own time I tried to plant those changes and discoveries within my muscle memory as I find as a performer I am very physical and I use my physical being in connection with emotions.

Sarah and myself did line runs in the time between performances however we found it was very hard to just do the play on a line run level. During line runs we found it was valuable to recap over things that we had discovered in Aix.

As we worked with Emma in prep for our Bath performances a main note for myself was now the lines were hopefully feeling more secure, not to just let the thoughts run into each other and to keep each unit of action fresh.

The performance space in Bath was very different to the one in Aix, much smaller and intimate. I actually found comfort in being able to speak directly to every audience member.

For myself as a performer the warm up prior to a performance is vital both technically and to get myself into the right place in terms of focus, character, energy and emotion. Emma took us through a series of activities focusing us on bringing new life to the work and energetically engaging with each other and the space but also again grounded us in the lives of these sisters.

In the Bath performances as the piece felt more rooted I felt an even stronger connection with Sarah both as characters and also fellow performers sharing the space. I felt we played a lot more within the units and felt more connected with each other in terms of ensemble play.
Our playing time was shorter but I don’t feel we rushed. As I deliver the words in the play, at this present time, each one feels as if they are a very delicate piece of glass or something like that. I am not sure if that makes sense of what I mean but I am always more than aware that my overriding objective is to tell our story and each word is so very important.

When working with performing art students, "loosing yourself in the action" is something I speak about with them and strive to help them understand. In the Bath performances I felt I let myself go a lot more within 'the moment' and found each unit was like riding a wave when surfing and sometimes at the end of a unit I would catch myself and question what had just happened. I also found in this heightened sense of loosing myself, I also had a voice in my head (either my characters voice or actors voice, I am not sure) guiding me in moments, telling me to breath, or slow down or just to alter the weight in my body.

Our performances in Bath also brought another new challenge, which was unlike in Aix; we had an audience who maybe had little prior knowledge of the sister’s history. This is something we spoke about a lot in rehearsals and as a company felt that the piece had to connect with the human condition and had to allow those with no factual knowledge to be able to follow the story.

And now as we prepare to go to Poland and the challenges that the spaces and audience will bring there, I am thinking about the overall tour and the length of it (till next October) and I am excited by the challenge that each space will bring and how to keep the play alive and new as it develops over time. In Poland we will be performing in front artwork by Vanessa Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury group. What a privilege.

Susan's Notes

The process of seeing my novel, Vanessa and Virginia, transposed into a stage play has been fascinating, hugely educational, surprising. I’ve written about it on my blog

Here, in addition, are my notes for a talk on the process given in conjunction with Beth Wright at the Tramway Theatre in Glasgow on November 3^rd 2010.

NOTES:

What prompted me to write a novel about Virginia Woolf?

For past ten years, I’ve been working on a scholarly edition of Woolf’s writings for Cambridge University Press. This led me to read or reread not only VW’s writing – her novels, essays, diaries, and correspondence – but also a great deal by her contemporaries.

This provided an extraordinarily rich seedbed of information – I felt as if I knew Woolf and Bell and their world intimately. This an important starting point for fiction: you have to know your characters to the extent that you can second-guess how they will feel, what they will say or do – and you have to know the world they inhabit well enough to be able to select from it the pertinent details that will bring it alive to a reader.

The work on the edition was also an impetus for other reasons. The more I read Woolf and Bell, the more questions I had about their lives. Many of these questions cannot be answered by the historical record. Like Orlando’s narrator, there are gaps and omissions in what seemed to me some of the most important places. For example, why did Vanessa Bell – whose art work (particularly in her decoration of her house at Charleston) suggests extraordinary sensuality - fall irrevocably in love with the homosexual painter Duncan Grant? The answers to these and other questions can only be speculative, and it seemed to me that fiction presented an arena in which it was possible to explore these questions and answers ethically.

To give an example, using a different question. It has always seemed to me particularly moving that Virginia Woolf committed suicide relatively late in life – when she was almost sixty. What was it about this particular moment in her life that led her to drown herself when she had survived other bouts of illness, surmounted other acutely difficult moments in her life. One possible explanation is the effect of the second world war and the threat of Nazi invasion. Virginia and Leonard knew they were listed by the Nazis and that in the event of an invasion they would be interned at best – Leonard was a jew after all, and Virginia had a record of mental health problems. To prepare for this they kept a spare can of petrol in their garage and discussed how they would gas themselves before the Nazis arrive. Did this fear (it was not at all clear that there would not be an invasion in 1941) and these discussions feed into Virginia’s depression and suicide? In fiction, it is possible to present these events in proximity – allowing the reader to speculate too and without making categoric claims.

To give an example, I want to read a short passage, where I use a known historical fact creatively to suggest adolescent rivalry between the two sisters.

READING:

‘It’s the fact that she must stand.’ Aunt Minna puts her cup down on the table. Her starched collar crackles as she reaches for the pot.

‘Another for you, Leslie?’ Father’s only response is a grunt. For the past half hour he has sat staring into the space ahead of him, his silence broken only by the occasional groan. Aunt Minna has not yet abandoned her aim of trying to cheer him and interprets his grunt as a yes.

‘Pass me your Father’s cup, will you Virginia, there’s a dear.’ You glare at Aunt Minna and I see that you have taken her silly observation to heart. Aunt Minna prattles on.

‘Writing seems to me a much better activity for a woman. The body is supported, and as long as one makes sure to sit up straight there is no pressure on the back. I can’t think it can be good for Vanessa to have to stand all day before an easel. Have you thought, dear, of the impact on your posture?’

I ignore Aunt Minna. I know what she says is kindly meant. I watch you pick up Father’s cup and pass it to her. There is no mistaking the look of fury on your face.

Only later do I realise the extent of your anger. For your birthday you ask Father for a lectern so that you can write standing up. You will not allow that painting is the more difficult art.

At the same time as I was working on the Woolf edition, I was also thinking about the relationship between sisters, particularly in connection to Freud’s insistence that the developing human infant forges its sense of self in relation to its mother, then its father. I was teaching a course on contemporary fiction that included Helen Dunmore’s novel about sibling incest, and reading Juliet Mitchell’s powerful challenges to Freudian theory in her studies Mad Men and Medusas and Siblings where she argues that siblings and one’s peers play an even more dramatic role in subject formation.

I mention this because the novel focusses closely on the relationship between Woolf and Bell as sisters, which as you will hear becomes a crucial focus for Beth’s play.

I want to say a few things about decisions I made in writing the novel, again with a view to hearing in a moment how they were transposed to the stage.

I wrote the novel from the point of view of Vanessa Bell, primarily because her written voice was much less familiar to me and I did not want to produce a poor pastiche of Woolf.

The novel begins after Virginia’s death with Vanessa looking back over their lives together, so that it is her memories that structure the chronology of the narrative. This was important because some aspects of the biography – for instance the period in the late 1890s when the sisters lose first their mother then their beloved half-sister Stella – were almost impossible to fictionalize as a sequence. (Coming so close together, the events felt like overload and hardly credible.)

As you will hear, this use of memory – of long interior passages – posed problems in the novel’s staging.

I said a moment ago that I think in order to write good fiction – in order to bring your characters alive on the stage – you have to know your characters and their world intimately. But as I’ve also suggested I think that what drives writing are questions – things you don’t know but which unfold as you work. For me personally, this not-knowing, this mystery, is at least as important in prompting me to write.

One of the things that was mysterious to me about Vanessa Bell was that the fact that she was a visual artist. To research this, I watched artists at work, and became fascinated by the way a painting is built up, brush-stroke by brush-stroke. This I think fed into the structure of the novel, which is a series of short vignettes which I hope cumulatively create a picture. It also gave me a rich source of metaphor and palette of language. It was fascinating to me to try to inhabit a character who sees the world visually, and the narrative draws heavily not only on descriptions of Vanessa painting, but on her paintings. As you’ll hear in a moment, this was a challenge which also presented an unexpected opportunity for the staging.

READING:

A wall of orange ablaze in the sun, the glow of hot coals. My colours have the sheen of silk, the rough textures of hessian. In the top right-hand corner of my painting is a pale pink square, edged in blue. The clash between the pink and orange is violent, compelling, gorgeous. I mute it by adding a daub of white to the pink, but only slightly. I do not want to diminish the effect. On the left of my canvas I paint a series of rectangles. Some interconnect, some stand alone. I paint two of them blue, one a potent aquamarine, the other paler, and tempered with the same hint of whiteness as the pink. I am careless with the outlines. I have had too many years of cloying detail. What interests me is the impact of colours.

In the centre of my picture I paint a single rectangle. It is a rich, crimson red with traces of darker vermilion. It dazzles and sizzles against the orange. I revel in its daring. I turn my attention to the two remaining bars. I paint one green, a blue-sage, slightly chalky. For the other I choose a strong burgundy.

I am fascinated by the way the different reds shun and call to each other. Sometimes, when I stand back from my canvas, I can see nothing else. The way the orange recedes against their impact astonishes me. I cannot believe the past has already lost its power. I turn my attention to my central rectangle. I am audacious. I will create the spaces I need. I will be mistress in my own house.

Process

These are the notes for a talk I gave regarding the process of adapting the novel and its translation from script to performance. Please forgive the roughness of the prose, it was not typed to be read by other eyes and I added and subtracted as I gave the talk. I also didn't check grammar and spelling! I refer to slides throughout so ignore these references. Nevertheless, here are my thoughts:

There are a number of difficulties with reducing a full length book into short play. I had to be ruthlessness and focussed only on aspects of the book pertaining to Vanessa and Virginia’s ‘close conspiracy’. I cut the majority of the passages where, for example, Vanessa is in conversation with others e.g. her conversation about Virginia with Stella is removed p. 21 and more minor relationships e.g. with Jack Hills pp. 31-32. This was partly due to space, but partly due to the fact that the play had to appeal to non-Bloomsbury scholars and, of course, the more names one introduces, the more confused people get.

BUT, this was still too much, so I focused only on aspects of their relationship which I believed were absolutely vital to our understanding of them, so even moments where Vanessa is intimate with key figures in her life had to be downplayed or removed e.g. the moment on pp.158-159 when she tells Angelica who her father really is, is edited out. I had to keep reminding myself that this play is called ‘Vanessa and Virginia’. This was difficult to achieve as I didn’t want to lose the flavour of the novel in process.

Other difficulties surrounded transforming a book which reads as a series of moments, episodes or prose paintings, into a play. Knowing how challenging such a fluid structure would be on stage, it was simply a case of hoping that the audience would be able to enter into the dreamlike fluidity of the swift succession of scenes and follow on the slightest of hints. I knew that we would have to recruit some very daring and emotionally mature actresses to achieve this, as the play has to move much more swiftly than the novel. The actors would have to transform from laughter to tears within the space of a few lines and from to youth, to maturity, to old age within the course of just an hour and a half. The novel has line breaks to help this transition, we had to rely on the shifting images, music and the actors’ skills. These difficulties were assisted by props and costume, but mainly relied on the skill of the actress.

Of course, some of the problems with editing the novel down were side-stepped by the nature of drama itself. They say that a picture tells a thousand words, which is a good thing because it allowed me to say certain thing without words. So much can be said visually through the movements and expressions of the actors, by the use of props and costume, and by the design of the set. My initial plans for the set were to have a moving image backdrop that reflected the mood and set the scene for the action unfolding on stage, but this seemed too literal for such a dreamlike play. So I wrote into the script the paintings which Susan describes in her novel and which would, in part, act as background. In an early performance of a tiny section (now cut) at the Cambridge ‘Making Sense’ Conference in September last year, I asked a friend to animate Bell’s 1914 Abstract and timed its evolution to coincide with various words and mood changes in the script. As you can see this is unfolding behind me as I speak. This I decided was firstly too distracting and secondly too expensive considering the amount of copyright permissions, so Emma Gersch (the director) and I, got in touch with the curator at Charleston and, with the permission of Henrietta Garnett, the set designers went and took photographs of the house. It is from tiny parts of these photographs that we abstracted our backdrop. Here is a selection of some of the images.

Emma and I then spent a very long day deciding on which parts of the images would best evoke specific moods. This is the table of the images that we decided to use and which parts of the image should form the basis of the picture behind the action. We then instructed the students working for Artswork Media in Bristol to play with and animate these images which evolve in the background.

Other ways round the need for more words included music and dance, the first to express mood and the second to express emotion. Here we have three different clips from the beautiful original score by composer Jeremy Thurlow of Cambridge University.

Dance was also used by the director to express certain feelings without the need for Vanessa to stand up and explain them, for example, the feeling of freedom Vanessa feels when she paints in St Ives and this moment expresses all the other moments in the novel when Vanessa speaks about the freedom she feels through painting:

Other dilemmas I came across with the script included whether to use 2 actresses or to bring other characters into play. It was pretty obvious that with the concentration on their relationship that the two actresses would prove a stronger focus for the story, but there were moments when I had to have other characters in order to make sense of the sisters’ bond. I side-stepped this problem in several ways. Firstly, by using imaginary figures, for example, the moment when Vanessa is showing Thoby her paintings and Virginia cuts in to steal him away, or by having the character give an impression of another person, for example, the section in the novel where George takes Vanessa out and parades her like a thoroughbred horse was transformed into Vanessa imitating George’s manner for Virginia. Compare pp. 29-30 in the novel with the script:

Vanessa: (to audience) I come into the drawing room swathed in white voile overlaid with black and silver sequins. I have amethysts and opals round my neck and my hair is pinned with enamel butterflies. George raises his eyeglass and appraises me. There is no difference between his gesture and his scrutiny of the Arab mare he has bought for my daily rides. I look to you for protection but you turn away.

(speaking to Virginia) At the party the rooms are ablaze with light. [Imitating George and miming a handshake] ‘Mr Chamberlain, allow me to introduce my half-sister, Miss Vanessa Stephen’. Miserably I shake his hand. I can think of nothing to say. I know George is angry. [Imitating George] ‘Would you like to tell me what that was about? I suppose you think it’s amusing to insult people. Your hair was awful, too!’

(to audience) George’s constant haranguing, his perpetual reminders as to our place and obligations, focused what might otherwise have remained vague longings for an alternative.

The actress who played Virginia was also scripted to play the role of Sir Leslie Stephen who shouts at Vanessa for the household accounts so pp. 34-35 of the novel becomes:

Virginia sits at the desk in imitation of Leslie Stephen

Vanessa: [To Virginia as father] The accounts, Father.

Virginia: [Imitating Leslie] What’s this? Strawberries! You allowed Sophie to order strawberries in May! Salmon! Do you mean to tell me that the fish we ate Tuesday last was salmon? Look at the price girl! You stand there like a block of stone! Do you wish to ruin me? Can you not imagine what it’s like for me now? Have you no pity?

The director also decided to use the actress playing Virginia to play Duncan (though he has no dialogue in the script).

Problems of dialogue. There isn’t much dialogue in the novel it is weighted, as the luxury of the novel form allows, towards reflection, observation and description; beautiful, but largely unworkable in drama. I therefore had to ensure that there was a balance of dialogue with monologue. Monologue can become dull to an audience. The first few drafts were far too monologue heavy and so I had to keep reworking it until I felt there was a better balance. I did this by reading the play aloud as I went along and playing the two characters myself. My flatmates started to suspect they were living with a schizophrenic! But as this is something Woolf used to do when writing her novels, I though what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Even so, there were two moments when the rehearsal process highlighted this as a problem. One of these moments came when I had allowed Vanessa the luxury of describing her paintings, but it was a luxury that Emma Gersch was sure the audience wouldn’t thank me for, so, at her request, I rewrote this long section where Vanessa describes her paintings, as dialogue. Thus this:

Scene transition - As Vanessa speaks the images slowly unfold layer on layer on the screen behind her.

Vanessa: I am working on two large canvases simultaneously. I move back and forth between them. In the first picture, an elegantly dressed woman perches on a footstool in front of a fire. She is gazing at the naked figure of a small boy, her son, we suppose. There is a coolness in her look, an aloofness, as if she is holding something in check. On the right of the picture a second woman is seated on a sofa with a much smaller child. She is dressed in workaday clothes. Unlike the first woman, she is fully engaged with the child she is holding. The woman on the footstool has a mirror and handkerchief in her hand. I cannot decide if these are intended for the boy or are part of her own preparation for leaving. Something about the way she gazes at the boy tells us she will soon depart. There is resignation as well as wistfulness in her expression. She is studying the boy far too intently, instead of clasping him to her. It is as if she knows that in order to detach herself she must restrain from loving him. There are no children in the second picture. On the left a nude reclines on a sofa, resting perhaps, from her work of posing as a model. On the right the woman is fully dressed, staring at the arrangement of fruit on the table before her. She appears indifferent to the woman on the sofa. Whatever she finds in the fruit bowl preoccupies her entirely. I cannot finish this second picture. There remains something vacant at its heart. The void persists. I begin to sense that neither of the women is central to the painting: whatever work of art they are creating seems somehow beyond their reach. Something in the women’s demeanour implies that I am responsible for their failure, that it is my task to alter their fate. Yet I scarcely know how.

Became this:

Scene transition – They stand gradually, move boxes together and sit together. They focus on two canvases in front of them.

64 – Painting M21 fades out as they begin speaking.

Vanessa: [to Virginia] I am working on two large canvases simultaneously. In this picture, we can see an elegantly dressed woman perching on a footstool in front of a fire. She’s gazing at the naked figure of a small boy, her son, we suppose.

Virginia: (looking at Vanessa) There is a coolness in her look, an aloofness, as if she’s holding something in check.

Vanessa: (nods) Here, on the right, the second woman is seated on a sofa with a much smaller child, she’s more engaged with the child she’s holding, but something about the way she gazes at the boy tells us she will soon depart.

Virginia: There’s resignation and wistfulness in her expression. She is studying the child far too intently, Nessa. Must she detach herself if she is to refrain from loving it?

Vanessa: [ignoring Virginia and indicating the 2^nd picture] There are no children in this second picture. On the left a nude reclines, while on the right, the woman is fully dressed, staring at the arrangement of fruit on the table before her.

Virginia: Whatever she finds in that fruit bowl is preoccupying her entirely!

Vanessa: I cannot finish this picture. There’s something vacant at its heart. [to self/audience] The void persists. I’m beginning to sense that neither of the women is central to the painting: whatever work of art they are creating seems somehow beyond their reach. [Looks at Virginia, then moves behind her) Something in the women’s demeanour implies that I am responsible for their failure, that it is my task to alter their fate. Yet I scarcely know how.

Obviously, theatre is a more collaborative process than fiction. Many more people have a creative impact on it: the director, the actresses, the lighting designer, the sound designer, the set designer all contribute to the overall effect. For example, my original script had Virginia entering and exiting at various moments, but the Director, Emma Gersch wanted Virginia on-stage at all times. This is, I think, a very sensible idea and useful for intensifying the focus of their relationship. The actresses obviously bring their own ideas to the delineation of their characters, but they were also, at one point, asked to write letters to each other in the style of Vanessa and Virginia which Emma and I decided were a perfect way to express the frustration they both felt when Virginia was taken away for Dr Savage’s rest cure:

Vanessa: Dearest Billy

Virginia: Dearest Nessa

Vanessa:

1) I hope this reaches you well and that you are recovering every day./

2) My news is only of our new home. My days are spent decorating our new rooms the walls are white with simple furniture./

3)The light feeds my soul. I have placed your desk in front of your window so you may look out over the trees as you write./

4) We have our own room and no unwanted footsteps outside our doors./

5) I cannot wait to share with you this place. I long for your return. /

6) Nessa.

Virginia:

1) I can’t begin to say how much I am longing to see you. I don’t think I can bear much more of this imprisonment./

2) I haven’t had any sort of real conversation for weeks. Won’t you write to them and tell them to let me come back to you sooner? You understand me better than they do./

3)I fear I will only continue to fade unless you rescue me. I promise to be good. The dark and emptiness of each day is numbing my mind./

4) Tell me about what you’ve done. Tell me it all. Tell me of the house, the garden.

Don’t, whatever you do, forget anything about me. The thought of seeing you is all that keeps me going./

5) Wouldn’t you like us to be together again? Bring me home. Please bring me home/

6) Billy

Rehearsals.

a. As I have already hinted, the rehearsal process highlighted certain areas that needed to be re-envisioned. It was also vital to the success of the production for the two actresses to become fully immersed in the lives of these women. During the rehearsals, the room was covered in their research.

b. And at various moments they contacted me for guidance about the relationships and characters that the sisters were referring to, and I was also requested to add the ages of Vanessa into the script to help them.

c. The rehearsal process was also itinerant, as some rehearsals were conducted at Bath Spa, others at Mountview and further ones at Robinson College in Cambridge where the composer was able to work closely with the production to create a score that reflects the events unfolding in the sisters’ lives.

The finished product

d. We now have a fully fledged play that was given its first flight at the Contemporary Woolf Conference in Aix en Provence.

e. The production is poised on the edge of a UK and European tour, partly made possible though AHRC funding.

f. You can catch the play in Glasgow June 2011 as part of the International Woolf Conference.

g. It will also be on at the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference at Bath Spa University on the 5^th and 6^th May next year. Further details of this can be found on the website: www.bathspa.ac.uk/bloomsbury