Rebecca Vaughan’s adaptation of Virginia Wolfe’s 1928 Cambridge lectures is a brilliant production. Her script and performance are extraordinary – a sixty-five-minute monologue which keeps the audience enthralled to the very last moment is no slight achievement. Her words, costume, gestures, in fact, everything takes us back to 1928. Then she transports the audience to 2028 with a vision of what creative women’s lives a century hence might be like. 

Along the way we meet the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and Aphra Behn who was one of very few women who managed to make a living by her writing. We hear of George Elliott (Mary Ann Evans), who lived openly with the married writer George Lewes which provided her with the freedom to write but scandalised Victorian society by which she was shunned. Vaughan compares this to society’s reaction to Tolstoy’s many affairs, even an illegitimate child, which drew no opprobrium. The straight-jacket of acceptable female behaviour for middle class women prohibited them from gaining the sort of knowledge and experience which drove and inspired male writers like Tolstoy. 

The section on Shakespeare’s mythical sister Judith, from Woolf’s original essays, was especially thought-provoking. What might have been possible if Judith’s similar gifts had been developed? But she would be offered no opportunity. No school for her. Betrothed as a teenager. Beaten (quite legally) by her father when she objected. Ran away to London and finds herself pregnant by the only actor-manager who did not laugh at her ambition. In the end, she kills herself. 

The production is very timely in an era where funding for all types of creative pursuits is rapidly diminishing. The opportunities for all practitioners are disappearing but women are particularly affected because, even almost a century after Woolf’s original essays, Vaughan shows us how poverty and gender inequality still stifle women’s creativity.