Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway takes to Oxford’s streets

Creation Theatre Company: Mrs Dalloway:

in central Oxford

From Friday, June 20, to Sunday, June 22

Review by JON LEWIS

IN Helen Tennison’s fascinating immersive interactive promenade production of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, audiences observe and listen to the central character, 51 year-old Clarissa Dalloway, a married woman with a teenage daughter, over the course of a day in mid-June 1923.

Woolf was inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses in following the unity of time, in setting the story in June, and in using the technique of interior monologue allowing readers access to characters’ private thoughts.

Tennison takes a leaf out of Dublin’s Bloomsday perambulations, with the streets of Oxford standing in for Bloomsbury, the performance happening in June.

We wear headphones. The technology enables us to watch Clarissa and other characters chat to others whilst hearing what they really think simultaneously. It is an inventive way to make the novel work theatrically.

Three actors (Julie Cheung-Inhin, Lucinda Lloyd and Tracy Bargate) play Mrs Dalloway, enabling us to have a nuanced, multi-faceted understanding of Woolf’s complicated heroine. All three give captivating performances.

Audiences gather at a disused former stationery shop not far from Oxford Station and are offered cold soft drinks, cake and biscuits. There are period tables and chairs placed around the space and large posters of script from the novel.

We learn about Clarissa’s dull politician husband Richard, and her paramour Peter, the man who proposed when they were young (both played by Dominic Brewer). More radically for the time, there are memories of a young woman Clarissa really loved, Sally (Emma Fenney), remembering their illicit kiss.

It’s a delightful revelation when we later meet Sally as an older woman, no longer a tearaway but a matronly mother of five, and hearing Clarissa’s disappointment about this in the interior monologue.

About half the production is spent joining one of three groups following one of the Clarissas around nearby streets. We see her order flowers. She meets various guests and as she walks, we listen to her thoughts on mortality and health on the headphones. Everyone gathers again near Oxford Canal where Clarissa departs, and we follow the stories of others. Then it’s back to the shop for the party.

An unforgettable achievement by all concerned.