Over the years, The Fringe at Prestonfield has become a welcome addition to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Comfortably outside the hustle and bustle of Edinburgh’s town centre, it offers a slightly more gentle and refined air to the plethora of guests and performers therein. As such, it’s perhaps not surprising to find the dependable hands of Dyad Productions have brought their adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, lifting the calibre even further.
Since its publication in 1929, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own has cemented itself in the public consciousness as a defining treatise on the place of women as writers and their history, as well as an unashamed proclamation of necessity for greater rights and independent for them if the art and craft of writing is to flourish. While Mary Wollstonecraft is inarguably her progenitor in written feminist thought, it’s fair to say that Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is in many ways the urtext of feminist literary theory and discussion.
Rebecca Vaughan brings her tried and tested talents to bring Woolf to life in the form of a public lecture: a pre-TED Talk, on the necessity of women writers to have the freedom to explore their writing without interruption and with support. As Woolf has it, her inheritance of £500 a year and a room of one’s own are the factors which allow her to work. From there, it’s a compelling and winding journey, first through the still notable, and occasionally risible, barriers in place for women in the late 1920s, through the history of women’s writing and an idealised theoretical possibility of a writer in the form of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith.
It goes rather without saying that Vaughan can do this form of monologuing without breaking a sweat and is an expert in keeping the audience rapt and entranced while she quotes from a supply of books on the prop table and paces the stage to and fro. Dyad has a knack for bending, snipping and rearranging pieces into a compelling form, and the natural cadences of Woolf’s writing make this piece feel as fresh as if it was written today.
It is only a mild annoyance that the marquee is such a venue that the usual unpredictable high winds buffeted throughout, and the loud groans of cars parking outside interrupted the immersion occasionally, but this is top-notch theatre and a fine melding of great writing into expert performance. Not to be missed.