Mrs Dalloway at HOME
Kristy Stott, Theatre EditorBook now
Mrs Dalloway
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway has inspired countless adaptations, but few have dared to reimagine it quite like this. Coming to HOME this September, this bold new production fuses live performance, original music and film, transforming Woolf’s modernist masterpiece while bringing her exploration of memory, identity and loss vividly into the present day.
Directed and adapted by award-winning theatre-maker Jen Heyes and co-created with Olivier Award-winning artist Kit Green, the production premiered at Storyhouse in Chester, before embarking on a UK tour. Heyes has described the production as an attempt to “capture the daring, radical energy at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s novel and make it vividly alive for today” – and that’s exactly what this ambitious adaptation sets out to do.
At its heart is a remarkable solo performance from Green, who inhabits every major character in the novel, weaving together Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for an evening party with the intersecting lives that unfold around her over the course of a single day. Blending live music, cinematic projections and inventive staging, the result is a richly layered production as emotionally affecting as it is visually striking.
Following its premiere in Chester, the production received a four-star review from Theatre Weekly, which praised it as “both faithful to the source material and deeply relevant to contemporary audiences.” Rather than simply adapting a modernist classic, Heyes and Green uncover the radical spirit at the heart of Woolf’s writing, demonstrating why Mrs Dalloway continues to resonate with readers and audiences more than a century after it was first published.
