STAGE REVIEW : ‘VIRGINIA’ IS TOP-HEAVY WITH TALK

All first-rate plays are splendid biographies, but not all biographies make fine plays. That’s the problem with Edna O’Brien’s “Virginia,” now having its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory (it first played at the Stratford in Canada in 1981 and starred Maggie Smith).

“Virginia” is an attempt to tell us the story of novelist-critic Virginia Woolf in the manner that transcends chronological narrative and fits the intense subjective style of Woolf herself. Along with James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, Woolf was one of the 20th Century’s earliest literary revolutionaries, gifted with a ravishing prose style and a sense of conveying absolute sensual immediacy (“the expression is the reality,” she says at one point in the play, which is as close as we need to get to a Woolfian manifesto).

We get all the compass points we need to place her, first at home under the eye of an imperious father (her mother died when Virginia was 12 and she educated herself out of his library); then with the coterie of young intellectuals out of Cambridge who later became the Bloomsbury group; then with her literary success and lunching with the likes of Yeats, George Moore and Gertrude Stein (who she refers to as “the suave sausage”).

We see too how the kind of writer she was to become exacted more of her than she could give and stay healthy. One of the more skillful elements of this play is how well it integrates her sexual terror with her precarious intellectual state--the two led to a chronic feverish nervousness that eventually wore her out. Woolf, who was born in 1882, was very much of the interregnum period of Matthew Arnold’s two worlds, “one dead, the other struggling to be born.” Like most other prominent intellectuals of her time, she absorbed the ideas of William James and Henri Bergson. In her work she was fully committed to the idea, like Lady Macbeth, that not only is the future in the instance, all of reality is in the instant as well. But she didn’t have the constitution to live with it.

Other characters appear in the play--principally Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West--but “Virginia” is virtually a monologue. That’s one of the difficulties this play shares with the genre “The Lives of the Greats”--we’re fully exposed to their banality and self-absorption without experiencing the redemptive power of their art. (What would “Amadeus” have been if we couldn’t have heard Mozart’s music?)

The Virginia Woolf we see here could be plenty bitchy, and while she was able to mask her fears, principally regarding sex, in invective and polished phrasing (there’s more complicity than real passion in her dalliance with Sackville-West), we miss the sheen of her prose, that makes tolerable the character of a woman infatuated with her precosity.

The most gripping moment of the play is when, with knowledge of her manic depressive personality, she foresees her own downward spiral into a depression she may never again escape. That, more than any premonition of Europe’s gathering historical nightmare, gives her great poignancy: It’s one thing to lose a loved one, but to lose yourself--where’s the solace and cure for that?

Megan Cole does a creditable job as Virginia, but this is a drama in which a character has to expose herself instead of being exposed by other characters and events, and Cole hasn’t found a way to deliver. Robert Berlinger’s direction is sluggish and uninspired; he hasn’t marshaled a culminating rhythm in this play and he hasn’t found the keys to unlock Virginia. Bruce French plays Leonard Woolf and Natalia Nogulich plays Sackville-West, but they’re both virtual shadows.

“Virginia” is top-heavy with talk that degenerates into chat. The Bloomsbury group has never appeared more arch and second-rate than in its appearance here. Maybe it was insular and vapid, but it was also tuned in, as were some of Virginia’s other acquaintances, into the considerable energies and talents of artists who made history in the early 20th Century. The pulse involved with shaping a new consciousness isn’t what we sense in this “Virginia,” who is delivered to us here as a gifted saloniste --bloated with clever gossip and self-ruining hysteria.

‘VIRGINIA’

“Virginia,” a play by Edna O’Brien, presented by the South Coast Repertory, with Megan Cole, Bruce French and Natalia Nogulich, directed by Robert Berlinger. Sets by Cliff Faulkner; costumes, Sally Cleveland; lighting, Paulie Jenkins; music, Sasha Matson. Performances Tues.-Sat., 8:30 p.m., Sun. 8 p.m., with Sat. and Sun. matinees 3 p.m., through May 18 at 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 957-4033.