The West Bridgford Dramatic Society will stage Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando from Nov. 12-16 at Studio Theatre, Stamford Road, West Bridgford, Notts NG2 6LS. Performances are at 7.30 p.m. each day and also at 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 16.
About the play
This imaginative and thought-provoking play is adapted from Virginia Woolf’s celebrated novel by Sarah Ruhl. It immerses the audience in a world where a sixteenth-century youth embarks on a remarkable journey, changing sex, encountering Queen Elizabeth I, and traversing centuries. Live the novel, it includes Orlando’s quest for love, grapple with questions of identity, and ultimately achieve a deep understanding of life’s experiences.
Barbara Seymour directs the play, which includes a talented ensemble of actors and stunning costumes and set.
The first session of the “A Room of One’s Own in Europe” seminar will take place on Thursday, Nov. 14, at 6 p.m. (CET) on Zoom and will track the reception of Woolf’s 1929 essay in Spain. (CET time is six hours ahead of EST time.)
Professor Laura M. Lojo Rodriguez, professor of English studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and Celia Recarey Rendo, freelance translator & editor, will lead the session.
To receive the zoom invitation please contact them at woolfianroom@gmail.com
About the project
The Room Project, which is in its second season, is a research project that takes up Virginia Woolf’s landmark essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and explores its full potential. Nearly a century after its publication, it asks the question: What echo chambers has A Room of One’s Own opened up?
As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)
I once wrote that famous Virginia Woolf quote on the wall of my office because it resonated with me. However, it has never resonated with me as strongly as it does today, the day after a U.S. presidential election that will allow a fascist to lead our country for the next four years.
Along with many others in the United States who value freedom, justice, truth, peace, kindness, and love — I find it devastating to face the reality of four years with a president who values none of those things.
But like Woolf — and like countless other women throughout this country and the world — I will not give up the fight. I will never surrender.
Instead, I will continue to fight for all the things I value. I will look to the words and actions of Woolf and others to guide my thinking and my life as we move forward to keep light alive in this dark, dark time. I will do my best to create a close community like the Bloomsbury group that I and my friends can count on for support.
If you have additional advice for me — and others — please do share it in the comments section below.
Virginia Woolf’s advice for defeating fascist thinking
Back in 2017, after Democrat Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to the most horrible of Republican candidates, I — like many people around the globe — was deeply concerned about the future of our country and our world. So I turned to Woolf for wisdom.
I never thought that essay would have a long shelf life. But as things have turned out, it still applies today — perhaps more than ever — as we grieve the defeat of yet another woman, Democrat Kamala Harris, who brought such brilliance and joy to the campaign trail.
Now, thanks to a Facebook reminder from Woolf friend, Emily MacQuarrie Hinnov, I will add a quote she shared from Woolf’s 1940 essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” as we move towards a frightening four years with a man who admires dictators holding the highest office in our land.
Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that, and you will be free…Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves…We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconsicous Hitlerism…Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?
Post-It notes written by visitors and added to a display at the “People Power Fighting for Peace” exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London in July 2017.
“On this day in 1922 Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room, was first published by the Hogarth Press. Approximately 1,200 copies were printed, priced at 7s 6d.
It was the first of Woolf’s novels to be published by her own company; from then on, all her works were published under its imprint. The printer was R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh.
Woolf’s Diary entry of Monday 26 January 1920 – the day after her 38th birthday – reveals her first thoughts about ‘a new form for a new novel’:
Suppose one thing should open out of another – as in An Unwritten Novel – only not for 10 pages but 200 or so – doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? . . . I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. . . . conceive mark on the wall, K. G. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. – Virginia Woolf, Diary 2, pp. 13–14. B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th edition, 1997, pp. 27–8.
Hatchard’s will celebrate the publication of Maggie Humm’s new book, The Bloomsbury Photographs (2024) with a special “lantern show” at 18:30 BST on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at its shop on Piccadilly.
About the event
At the event, Maggie Humm will offer a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group by showing a curated selection of the thousands of photographs that shows them in a setting of domestic intimacy. Scenes include the pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays of the group.
According to Hatchard’s: “Several photographs are blurred as if taken in a hurried moment of time, and unguarded close-ups reflect complex personal relationships – revealing them to be more than simply documents; they are testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.”
Humm is vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of many monographs about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, including her novel Talland House, which is based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
