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To the Lighthouse review – fierce and comic thoughts spoken out loud

Cork Midsummer festival online
Virginia Woolf’s novel, centring on an Edwardian marriage and the rupture of war, is richly adapted and beautifully staged with a strong ensemble cast

Shadow and light alternate in Marina Carr’s rich new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, filmed in Cork’s Everyman theatre in a co-production with Hatch Theatre Company. In this group portrayal of an Edwardian marriage and the rupture of the first world war, Carr finds a theatrical style to match Woolf’s technique of depicting the internal flow of thoughts and emotions, plunging beneath the surface of things.

In director Annabelle Comyn’s beautifully orchestrated production, dialogue is interwoven with private thoughts and reactions, all spoken aloud. The result is often comic, sometimes ferocious. At the centre of the torrent of words is the gracious, much-admired Mrs Ramsay (Derbhle Crotty) spending summer in the Hebrides with her husband, children and friends. Mr Ramsay (Declan Conlon) constantly seeks her reassurance that his scholarly brilliance has not faded. His latest book is “a work of genius”, she says, followed by: “God, you’re exhausting”. For her, this bolstering is what a wife must do in marriage, a prospect rejected by the young artist, Lily (Aoife Duffin), who is also tired of being told that women cannot paint or write, a point underscored heavily.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35UJkCv
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