A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / THREE GUINEAS at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse - Woolf Works

This year marks the centenary of Nancy Astor being the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons, but she was not the first female MP; that was the Sein Fein member and feminist Countess Constance Markievich who refused to take her seat in the UK Parliament.  A woman who deserves greater acclaim in my eyes than Astor who later was an appeaser and virulent anti-Semite. 

However to celebrate Astor taking her seat and the passing of the first law that banned discrimination based on gender or marriage, the Globe hosted a reading of Virginia Woolf's two most famous essays: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN on the subject of women and fiction and her more controversial THREE GUINEAS in which she explored the connection between patriarchy and militarism.  It was definitely a game of two halves.

First up was Hattie Morahan with A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN which she interpreted wonderfully.  Both essays were abridged by Globe artistic director Michelle Terry and directed by Blanche McIntyre and it felt like Morahan got the better attention. In A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN, Woolf brilliantly explores the many interpretations of the phrase "Women and fiction": she had been asked to give a talk on the subject in the autumn of 1928 at Newnham and Girton, the two foremost colleges for women in Cambridge, and after these events she enlarged them into a book.

Virginia explores, in a wonderfully 'meta' style, her process of understanding what they wanted to hear: the role of women in fiction or women who have written fiction?  While exploring this quandary, she enlarges it to show us the world around her - being told to stay off the grass by a Cambridge beadle, being refused entry to see a book in the college library by an attendant, musing on the actual financing and building of the college by rich men for their sons' education, the delicious food served at lunch in the men's college compared to the plain and dull dinner served at the women's college.  Back in London and starting her research at the British Library, she discovers many books on the subject of women and their place in society, both here and overseas... all written by men who seem to be very angry about the subject.

It is these unseen influences that leads to Virginia stating that her conclusion is that in the future for a woman to be a successful writer she needs to have an independent income and a room of one's own.  Being allowed to write, unfettered from the distraction of a job or family or visitors, will lead to generations of female writers writing not just fiction but books on many subjects "for books have a way of influencing each other".  On her way to her conclusion she cites such originators as Aphra Behn, the playwright who proved that women could earn a living by writing, the poet Anne Finch, Jane Austen - who Woolf compares to Shakespeare as a writer whose writing shows a clarity of vision with no petty hatreds cluttering that vision - George Elliot, Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte. 

She also famously imagines Shakespeare having a sister whom she names Judith, a woman with the same wish to write as her brother and with the same need to express herself but, diametrically opposed to her brother, had no chance of education, no chance of becoming a performer to gain access to the theatre, but meets an actor-manager who promises to help her but instead gets her pregnant and in a fit of despair, Judith killed herself and "lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle".  One of my favourite things to do is to read Virginia Woolf's writing out loud and twice Hattie Morahan paused to simply take a breath, obviously affected by what she was reading.

After the interval Joan Iyiola read THREE GUINEAS, Woolf's controversial reaction to the encroaching shadow of Fascism.  In 1932 Virginia Woolf started writing a new book which would intersperse the fictional story of the well-to-do Pargiter family and their changing fortunes from 1880 to the 1930s with essays relating to aspects within the fictional chapters.  She found it ultimately not to be working so she concentrated on the fictional chapters which later turned into her novel THE YEARS. published in 1937 to huge success.  But the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe led her back to her 1932 essays and she expanded on them, concentrating on the links between the patriarchal society and the rise of militarism and the rush to war.

Like in A ROOM OF OWN'S OWN, Virginia uses repetition to enforce her central thesis, forever circling back to certain thoughts or phrases, but while Morahan made these distinct from each other, Iyiola offered no variation to her tone and sure enough, people started leaving while she was only mid-way through.  I mentally wandered quite a few times and started to feel the agony of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouses's purgatorial seats.  It felt like the first half had been worked on more and poor Joan was left to just read out the text without being able to illuminate it. But any excuse to hear my favourite writer celebrated and spoken aloud is to be grasped at.

TARTUFFE: THE IMPOSTER at the Lyttelton, National Theatre - Sing Out, Tartuffe!!

355 years after first appearing on stages, Molière's wily Tartuffe seems to be more popular now than ever: Molière's idea of a rich family almost being dismantled by a holy man who has been invited into their home only for him to be exposed as a fraud, seems to fit any number of rewrites and emphasis: the gullible rich who adopt new spiritual fads to cover their shallowness, or the Holy Fool who is punished for daring to break through society's glass ceiling.

First performed in 1664, the play was immediately banned by Louis XIV, not because he was personally offended, but because of outrage by the Catholic church in France over the idea that someone who purports to be a holy man is in fact a lecherous charlatan - the very idea!  A few years later, Molière rewrote it but that too was banned so he tinkered around with it again and when finally performed in 1669 the play was a success.

John Donnelly has pitched his version right into the London of today - his Tartuffe could easily have wandered off from Waterloo Bridge's climate change protesters - and in his final denouncement of the rich fools he has infiltrated, Tartuffe made some very topical jabs at their eternal hatred of the other, the imposter, the foreigner.  In a huge North London living room, overshadowed by a gold full-size replica of Michelangelo's 'David', former politico Orgon has turned his family upside down by inviting into their home a scruffy, soap-dodger called Tartuffe who claims to be the leader of a new religion that can lead believers to the New Dawn.

This modern-day Rasputin has totally won over both Orgon and his mother Pernelle but Orgon's trophy wife Elmire and his spoilt children Damis and Marianne are less convinced and suspect Tartuffe to be leaching off them.  Soon Tartuffe's equally squalid supporters are making a nest for themselves in the living room and Orgon has in a moment of spiritual weakness, given Tartuffe incriminating evidence that he committed crimes against the state "in the last ill-advised war".

When Elmire finally convinces Orgon that Tartuffe has been wanting to have sex with her all along, Orgon orders him out of his house.  But Tartuffe returns with a bailiff called Loyal who instead hands the shocked Orgon a writ informing him that it's the family who must leave because Orgon gave Tartuffe the deeds to the house.  Tartuffe is triumphant... but is he?

Blanche McIntyre's production played more like a farce with people popping out of hiding places and flying over the furniture so the darker elements of the characters was lost; in Donnelly's script they all had the depth of a Comic Strip special - sexy wife, yuppy daughter, rich fool, wily imposter - but it was only in the last moments that Molière's savage satire made itself really known which over-tipped the play.  However there were more than enough laugh-out-loud lines and the main principals took you along with the freewheeling antics.

The really annoying thing I found about the production was a bad case of inaudibility among quite a few of the supporting members of the cast who could not throw their lines out into the auditorium - it might be more realistic to speak your lines directly to whoever you are in the scene with but it made for a lot of the mumbled lines as they were not also including the audience in - now a new breed of actors from smaller venues are appearing on the large National stages, they really need to be told how to play to the bigger houses.

No such problems with the central pairing: Broadway veteran Denis O'Hare was hugely charismatic as the imposter Tartuffe although the idea to have his character speak in a bizarre mash-up of Brazilian and/or French strangled some laugh lines unnecessarily; we know he is 'other' to Orgon's family there was really no need to do it, better he just played it in his natural US accent.  He was very well-partnered by Kevin Doyle's Orgon, a man hoist by his ostentatious petard thanks to his own gullibility.

Susan Engel was at her imperious best as Pernelle and Olivia Williams was a shrewish Elmire, driven to screeching distraction at her husband's blind stupidity.  Kitty Archer was good fun as the whiny, entitled Marianne and her lover, the Socialist Marxist poet Valere was played well by Geoffrey Lumb.  I also wanted to highlight Matthew Duckett as the wide-boy Loyal who made an impression in a relatively small scene.

Robert Jones' huge elaborate set made me want to explore the rest of Orgon's house to see it it was as ghastly as that room and Toby Park gets a shout-out for his physical comedy routines.

I am glad I have finally seen TARTUFFE onstage - as I said it's done often so it was only a matter of time before seeing it - and while I enjoyed a lot of it and the performances, I suspect a less comedy-driven production might show why it has remained such a mainstay of our stages.