Virginia Woolf's extended essay on women and fiction, now a classic of feminist literature, grew out of two lectures she delivered in 1928 to Newnham and Girton Colleges in Cambridge. Her fundamental argument is simple: a woman needs five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if she is to write fiction or poetry. By insisting on the link between financial security and intellectual labour, she answers the question she has set for herself-why are women so often written about, rather than actually writing? Why in the Elizabethan age were there no flowerings of female literature when every man and his dog, so it seems, were reeling off sonnets and plays? The blunt answer is that intellectual freedom depends upon material things and women have always been poor.

Clare Dalton and Mark Lindberg's stage adaptation of Woolf's text, currently showing at the Burton Taylor, follows on from an acclaimed production of A Room of One's Own by Eileen Atkins and Patrick Garland. It is a one-woman show, set in a room in Girton College at the time of Woolf's original lecture. The room is small and plainly furnished, with a grandfather chair in one corner, a writing desk in the centre, and a lectern on the other side. The setting is initially confusing-is this what lecture rooms are like at Girton? Or is it an ideal room of one's own, replete with wooden pulpit? But the room does seem to match the mixed mood of Woolf's talk, a formal lecture delivered with unusual intimacy and imaginative flair. Recurring themes give the work its coherence – Woolf's bemused memory of an officious college beadle ushering her off the grass and back onto the path; of an elderly librarian waving her away from the college library; and of Shakespeare's gifted, though wholly fictitious, sister Judith, who takes her own life rather than suffer the slings and arrows of ridicule from leering men. Woolf famously seeks to resurrect the ghost of Shakespeare's sister as the spirit of an age to come, and exhorts her audience of educated young women to get busy: secure the five hundred a year, find the room, and start writing. While the script of Dalton's play is faithful to Woolf's original words, it is necessarily abridged, and the final "peroration" of the original text changes tone in Dalton's version. The faint note of reproach in the original, asking why women writers have not yet done more to advance their cause, is replaced by a declaration of defiance in the face of all the would-be beadles of learning and officious wardens of intellectual freedom.

23.04.04   JUSTIN BEPLATE