Exploring " what we need for creativity to happen" on Shoreham stage

In a solo show, Rebecca Vaughan performs Woolf’s 1928 exploration of the impact of poverty and sexual inequality on intellectual freedom and creativity.

As Rebecca says, it’s the chance to take a wry, amusing and incisive trip through the history of literature, feminism and gender and to meet Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Aphra Behn and Shakespeare’s imagined sister Judith.

“I am a massive fan of Virginia Woolf and this is a piece that I had wanted to adapt for almost a decade. It took until the pandemic to get around to it. It's a piece that she created in 1928 and published in 1929, a conglomeration of two big lectures that she gave to female students in Cambridge. It was looking at the premise of what do we need for creativity to happen, and she said it was £500 and a room of one’s own. I think we worked out that that would be about £18,000 now!

“But the idea is basically that in order to be creative you need a place to think and a little bit of money and then you will have your creative freedom. She was also thinking why are there so few female writers and female composers and working-class writers and working-class composers, and the point is that if you don't have space and time and a little bit of money then intellectual freedom cannot happen. She was saying it's not that women aren’t good at it. It's just that they haven't really had the chance. The great thing is that these lectures which she turned into a book are really humorous and really not dry at all. She creates Shakespeare's sister. She asked what would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who was just as talented as he was, and she looks at all the ways in which she would have been turned away. And then even if somebody had taken pity on her and given her a chance, then she would still have had the problem with children. She would have had children or become pregnant. Virginia Woolf was looking at the impossibility of women being creative and being mothers at the same time which is still an issue today.

“Woolf was talking at a time when women were being turned away from universities and turned away from libraries. Virginia Woolf created these lectures and when she got such a great response, she realised that there was a lot more mileage and she started putting them down on paper and started stretching them and turning them into a book. She added not so much fiction as really just moments and stories and memories. It is like a crossover between fiction and lecture.

“I'm doing this as a solo show, and it really lends itself to that. The book really talks to the reader, and as I say, it is really not dry. It's very humorous and it's really accessible to anyone. It is not just for women. It is for the men as well that have maybe felt trapped by the patriarchy. We have had so many fantastic responses from men and women to the show, people just saying that there's so much in it that is still so relevant. In the lectures Virginia Woolf was talking about what things would be like a century hence and because the lectures were in 1928 she's talking about 2028. Some of the things she gets quite close; some of the things she's way off. She was saying that by 2028 women would be able to do absolutely anything they wanted but the mindset is still that of someone in the 1920s. She's talking about women being able to haul coal sacks in the future!”