Mrs Dalloway – London Library

Adapter and Director: Helen Tennison

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel is given fresh life through this daring and inventive adaptation by Creation Theatre in one of London’s most beautiful buildings, The London Library, of which Woolf herself was a member.

There’s an ease to this highly original staging, even as audiences are handed a pair of headphones and a radio receiver on entering. Though obviously an anachronistic clash with the historical setting of the piece, once donned their purpose is revealed; the actors before you in person give life to the exterior world of the text while the headphones allow for their interior world to be expressed, as their voices monologue in and around the actions of the actors before you.

It’s a daring choice from adapter and director Helen Tennison to try to capture both the literary essence of the novel, while also crafting engaging theatre, but at times it can feel that the latter comes at the expense of the former. Part of this is down to the three different actors who portray Mrs. Dalloway herself – Tracy Bargate, Julie Cheung-Inhin, and Lucinda Lloyd, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

None has the chance to fully form a central character to latch onto, and it’s never quite clear if they are all Mrs Dalloway or simply just distinct parts of her making up a whole. Opposite the Dalloways, Emma Fenney and Lydia May-Cooney do an excellent job bringing to life an assortment of side characters that give strong and direct life to the play’s world, and it’s this creation of a believable world that is the show’s biggest strength.

Though not an exact model of the novel’s London, the production has artfully selected parts of the city to ground the interwar period of the piece and make it easy to get sucked into the world these characters inhabit. This leads to the most exciting part of the whole experience as the audience is guided from the Library itself by the three distinct Mrs Dalloways, who shepherd separate groups through the busy streets around The Library (headphones still attached and monologues still playing).

When it works, as it does in a quiet St James’s Square that introduces the character of Septimus (Dominic Brewer), it really is theatrical spectacle at its best. When it misfires, as it does while dodging passersby and construction works on the streets surrounding the square, the illusion breaks and the show becomes a victim of its own imbalanced ambition.

Things are thankfully given a more stable wrap-up back at the Library once more as the audience is ushered into a large function room for a party thrown by Mrs Dalloway. Again, much of what’s great about the production is on display, the room itself is stunning and each audience member is announced as one of Dalloway’s illustrious guests, but the narrative of the whole thing attempts to peak on storylines and themes that simply haven’t been built up sufficiently to have the impact they need, so the enjoyment remains skin-deep and largely drawn from spectacle rather than substance.

It’s an intriguing concept for an adaptation, but the stumbles are evident. A little smoothing out of these rough edges, and this would easily be a wonderful show – for now, it’s a novelty that will delight the curious but stops just short of enthralling them.

Runs until 15 June 2025 and then in Oxford until 22 June 2025