Both raw and deeply human, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Too lays bare the destructive dance between creativity and madness.
“When I write as me, the words don’t come.” It’s a feeling all too relatable for anyone who’s ever sat down to create — let alone to write a debut novel with agents, publishers, and partners past and present breathing down your neck. It is this feeling of suffocating writer’s block that builds to a fever pitch for protagonist Victoria in I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, too.
Coline Atterbury’s new play follows Victoria, an aspiring writer living with her boyfriend, Mark, when her creative spark is ignited by a newfound infatuation with Virginia Woolf’s novels — an infatuation that slowly morphs into a feverish obsession threatening to destroy everything in its wake. Victoria’s mania is only heightened by the chance reintroduction of Leon into her life; her ex-boyfriend, a gentle, bookish academic who serves as the counterweight to her reckless, though often tender, relationship with Mark and its frequent, peer-pressure-induced midweek cocaine benders. Whilst tackling topics of extreme seriousness such as bipolar disorder, psychosis, and grief, Atterbury’s masterstroke lies in setting them against the backdrop of the banality of life in London as a thirty-something.
The play’s director, Olamide Candide-Johnson doesn’t rely on extravagant set pieces — with its limited space, three-person cast and restrained use of music and lighting — yet the precision of the writing and the performances make it worth far more than the sum of its parts. As Victoria’s fixation with Virginia Woolf deepens, she begins to imitate more elements of the author’s own life. The most striking of these is her entanglement with the two men, echoing Woolf’s own adulterous relationships within Victorian Bloomsbury’s literary circles, with figures such as Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.
As the tension within the love triangle grows increasingly fraught, the performances of Atterbury and her co-stars, Charlie Coombes-Roberts and Andrew Hawley, rise in intensity — creating moments of piercing pathos amid what can sometimes be frenetic sequences. Despite often tackling darker themes, the excellent chemistry between the actors provides many funny moments as well, providing oft-needed breathing room for the audience.
Despite this exploration of relationships and sexuality, the main theme of the play is undoubtedly mental health and an interrogation of how it is dealt with in our society. Atterbury has said that “the piece is inspired by my own experience with bipolar disorder. There’s this romanticised idea that creatives are chaotic, wild, living on the edge — but I wanted to explore how society perceives madness and creativity.” It is an exploration which has often proved a difficult one to convey in media, with several depictions of a character’s slow descent into madness becoming merely a trope resulting in caricature. However, Victoria’s Bipolar Disorder, as well as Mark and Leon’s reaction to it, is handled in a tasteful and nuanced manner, highlighting the strain that such an illness can create for someone and the people that love them most.
Atterbury and Candide-Johnson have created an incredibly evocative work which carefully explores the often symbiotic relationship between madness and creativity, all the while treating its characters with the empathy and reverence that the subject matter deserves. In its masterful balancing of humour and heartbreak, the piece manages to be a rumination of huge, existential themes whilst still feeling acutely human.