RSC embraces ‘hugely challenging’ task of staging Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

By Chris Wiegand Stage editor · The Guardian Culture

The Royal Shakespeare Company announces ambitious adaptations of novels in season that includes Elizabeth Debicki as Richard II and Damien Molony as Coriolanus The Royal Shakespeare Company is to stage two highly experimental novels, written almost 100 years apart and posing serious conundrums for adaptation, according to co-artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey. Virginia Woolf’s 1925 “day in the life” classic Mrs Dalloway and Susanna Clarke’s otherworldly 2020 award-winner Piranesi grapple with what they described as “a century-old theatrical preoccupation: the exploration of inner life on stage”. Harvey will direct Mrs Dalloway, adapted by Zoe Cooper, and said it would be “hugely challenging” to “bring the inside out” from Woolf’s novel, which uses stream of consciousness as the eponymous heroine gives a party whose guests’ thoughts intermingle with her own. Cooper, said Harvey, has “created this extraordinary sense that we as an audience are flowing in and out of people’s minds, in and out of different moments in their histories”. Mrs Dalloway opens in the Swan theatre in April and will be the third major adaptation of the novel staged in England within a year: Kit Green’s one-woman performance recently toured and Holly Robinson’s new version opens at the Yard in London in March. Continue reading...