THEATER REVIEW : ‘Vita and Virginia’: A Masterful Dance of Two Women

Is the gift of intellectual brilliance worth the cost of spontaneity, of sensuality, of sexual and physical confidence? Fleshed out by two extraordinary actresses, that is the central, riveting question raised in “Vita and Virginia,” which opened Monday at the Union Square Theatre.

This epistolary play is directed by a third great actress, Zoe Caldwell, as an intense conversation between two sinuously verbal women. It chronicles what is if not the most passionate literary love affair of the century then at least one of the most thoroughly documented ones.

In “Vita and Virginia,” Vanessa Redgrave--one of the greatest actresses of our time--plays a woman who is at best a second-rate artist, the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West. Wife of diplomat Harold Nicholson, Vita had an aristocratic pedigree dating back to the time of William the Conqueror, an ancestry that was part of her appeal to the snob in Virginia Woolf. Woolf, of course, was a distinctly first-rate writer, and this was enormously attractive to Vita.

Eileen Atkins adapted the play from the women’s correspondence, and here she reprises the intellectually passionate but rather severe and sexually prim Virginia she played in her one-woman show “A Room of One’s Own,” which she adapted from a Woolf essay of the same name.

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If the snob in Virginia discreetly coveted Vita’s noble birth, the intellectual in her worshiped Vita’s elegant sensuality. At the same time, Virginia deeply feared Vita’s attraction to and attractiveness to several other women. Redgrave doesn’t so much enter her role as infuse it with an intoxication for life and travel, whether Vita is rhapsodizing about the Persian prime minister’s red beard or the loveliest fish in a Hollywood aquarium.

In life Redgrave is often aggressively unfashionable in her dress and her political views. She seems to feel extraordinarily comfortable, however, in playing Vita as elegance personified. Everything she wears is long and stylish: the lace-up boots that climb up above her knee, the shimmering rope of pearls that reaches suggestively down past her belly, the endless fox that encircles her neck. The only thing short about Vita is her henna-brown hair, in a bob a la Dorothy Hamill, only chic. As she expounds passionately about whatever she experiences, her bangs fall boyishly into her stunning blue eyes, as if she knows she has beauty to spare. When she drapes her legs over the seat of a divan, she looks like a coltish, growing boy, like the ageless, timeless, pan-sexual Orlando, the character that Woolf created as a tribute to Vita. (Both actresses are considerably older than the parts they are playing, which given these performances should bother none but the most literal minded.)

Atkins’ performance makes explicit how Virginia had a much guiltier relationship to pleasure. She plays the impartial observer (referring to Vita as “an avowed Sapphist” as if she herself were ruggedly heterosexual), but her ruse is thoroughly betrayed by the frankly carnal way Atkins stares at Redgrave, like a spider who doesn’t care how she looks to the fly in her web.

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The distribution of power between the women constantly shifts because they each have their unquestioned areas of dominance. Vita breathlessly describes every new novel of Virginia’s as “dazzling” but with a nervous awareness that she can never rival her friend’s powers of description. Vita, however, is clearly the better writer of love letters, hands down. She is able to say, plainly, “I miss you in a simple, desperate way,” something Virginia can never seem to do.

In fact Vita complains of Virginia’s too perfect phrasing, which seems to douse passion. She claims, rightly, that Virginia remains aloof from all the “jolly vulgarity” of life. And indeed, Virginia’s brilliance needs nothing to dance off of; though she shares with Vita her perfect, devastating descriptions of dinner party guests, Virginia’s art is a solo act.

Virginia wrote “Orlando” at least in part out of insecurity, as an attempt to bind Vita, who was simultaneously conducting affairs with poet Dorothy Wellesley, the 28-year-old Mary Campbell, and perhaps others. In the novel, which Vita inevitably found “dazzling,” Virginia describes the naked male Orlando: “No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing.” When Orlando turns into a woman, she is “loveliness incarnate.”

“Vita and Virginia” explores the interplay of art and life, and finds the ennobling and yet stultifying achievement of literary perfection as something less divine than living life fully. As a dramatic experience, however, the play is hindered by its form; the two characters cross in the mail and never really connect to each other at the same time. The play itself, in fact, is hindered by the very thing that defines its themes--the one who writes beautifully doesn’t seem to live as fully, and the one who can’t write well is the more sublime character. As a dramatic work at two and a half hours, “Vita and Virginia” does not always shine, but as a set piece for two terrific actresses, it is a jewel.

* “Vita and Virginia,” Union Square Theatre, New York, (212) 505-0700 or Ticketmaster (212) 307-4100. $25-$45.