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.