Director: Lois Ellis
Venue: MTC's Russell Street Theatre
Cast: Pamela Rabe
Verdict: * * *
IN this pensive one-woman play, Pamela Rabe recreates Woolf's lecture in a sustained, and by turns angry or whimsical, speculation, builds on that fact to indict men's treatment of women throughout the ages.
More importantly, it is not men's behavior as such that is her point, but rather how difficult it is to discuss women and fiction given women's experience.
There is also her wise advice which underpins all the musings: for a woman to be creative, she must have money and a room of her own.
This dramatisation is based on two papers read originally by Virginia Woolf to the Arts Society at English colleges in 1928.
Woolf's meditations are eloquent and sometimes amusing - but they are heavy with the stamp of feminism, 1928-style.
Still, the many women in the opening night audience often nodded their approval as Rabe's Woolf made an elegant path through the spectrum of oppression that has long subjugated creative women.
Certainly the crimes of man are considerable. Woolf wends through a formidable prosecution - never shrill, yet devastating in the focussed smoulder of her fury.
There is Shakespeare's sister Judith, a mythical but all too believable account of how Elizabethan patriarchy would have smothered her talents.
Or the comparison of Shakespeare's incandescent mind, unburdened by domestic chores, with Bronte's plight (putting aside Wuthering Heights to do the cooking and sweep the floors).
To some tastes, Pamela Rabe may import a slightly over-fluttery manner and fail to engage a certain overall quality of, well, Englishness.
But her performance is technically flawless. She never dips into excessive sarcasm and carefully preserves the momentum of Woolf's thoughts.
Rabe moves around designer Michael Pearce's clever set - a perspective of text taken from the page of a novel, magnified to fill the length of the whole stage - and forges a strong link to her audience.
This 90-minute production informs as much as it stings, offering fascinating perspectives and skilled stagecraft.