4th - 5th July 2025 7:30pm
Emul8 Theatre Present:
ROOM
Adapted and performed by Heather Alexander
Directed by Dominique Gerrard
An intriguing journey into the creative mind of Virginia Woolf
AWARD WINNER – BEST FEMALE ACTOR 2023
“A beautiful portrayal by an accomplished actor at the top of her game.” British Theatre Guide
ROOM is a provocative, yet accessible dramatic interpretation of Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One’s Own. The show dramatizes Woolf’s creative struggles as she forms the ground-breaking ideas behind her iconic text ‘A Room of One's Own.’ Major themes of ROOM include the importance of women's education and of providing opportunities for women to be creatively free to tell their own stories. ROOM uses the space of one’s own room as a symbol for many larger issues, such as privacy, leisure time, and financial independence, each of which has proved essential components of the inequalities between men and women.
In the show, we follow Woolf as her stream of consciousness musings about gender and creativity gain momentum. We experience the narrator moving between her study, lecture room, the British Museum and Oxbridge locations as she manifests her ground-breaking insights. The text remains as relevant and important today as it invites the audience to reflect upon what and how much has changed? All the famous passages from the essay are here: the realisation that poverty is a serious bar to women writing, the story of Shakespeare's sister, and the realisation that in writing fiction, women must find their own voice and place; not just exist as foils for men. That's the Bechdel Test, many years early.
Virginia Woolf lives! Why was Woolf refused entry to the library and pushed off the grass at Oxbridge? Who was Shakespeare’s Sister? Why is Woolf still a featuring in movies and why are bookshops still stocking and selling out of so many of her works? Find answers and discover why she is still taught in schools and universities today. Join us in the ROOM and see for yourself why her ideas are still so relevant today. Be part of the inspirational journey behind Woolf’s iconic lectures – A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN – one woman’s vision ahead of her time.
Room is a brand new stage adaptation of this seminal feminist work, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, first presented as a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge in 1928, then published the following year.Heather Alexander both adapts the piece and plays Virginia Woolf as the author gives an illuminating lecture on the gender disparity in fiction, a literary tradition dominated by men.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…”