A Deep dive into the world of Virginia Woolf, Écrire sa vie found its first source of inspiration in The Waves. Could you tell us how you first encountered this work and what made you want to adapt it for the theatre?
I’ve been fascinated by Virginia Woolf for years, and her words are buried in my intellectual and emotional memory. In March 2020, during the first lockdown, I reread The Waves and was left amazed. The chaos of the pandemic, its impact on our lives, and the uncertainty of the following period found a very powerful echo in my reading, because of how beautifully Virginia Woolf shines a light on the implacable force which governs our lives and on time whose passage we cannot control. The characters of The Waves moved me deeply because they dive head-on into existence, against all odds, and embrace this human condition no one can escape with an absolute desire for intensity. From there, I dove back into the rest of Virginia Woolf’s work, discovering or rediscovering the shining power of her writing and thinking. The Waves were a starting point, and though I’ve kept the structure of a bildungsroman which follows an inseparable group of friends from childhood to adulthood, I also drew inspiration from the rest of her work. The writing of the show was enriched by myriad excerpts from her novels, but also her essays, her journals, and her letters.
The question of the place of language is essential in Virgnia Woolf’s writing. What did you make of it in your creation?
For Virginia Woolf, to exist in the world means first and foremost to be able to articulate what we feel. While the characters have widely different personalities, they all consider language to be of the utmost import. Words are like a lifeline, a raft to which they cling so as not to drown. If they speak, it’s to survive. This power of language in Virginia Woolf’s work creates a tension between the fear of never being understood, of never finding the right word to escape one’s loneliness, and the desire to try, to give in to the irresistible attempt at connection between two human beings. The words thus exchanged tell of how dialogue can make and unmake people and how, through those very words, we face others to, maybe, forever leave this exchange behind. Those characters share what connects them and what hurts them, and through their voices, Virginia Woolf tells the story of her own birth as a writer.
Do you see a connection between the story written by Virginia Woolf and her own life as an author?
If you read her journals, Virginia Woolf seems obsessed by one question: how to write when there is no future? Her life was marked by uncertainty and chaos from a very young age, making any projection into the future impossible, both on a personal and political level. On a personal level first because death entered her life in a very violent manner: in less than ten years, she lost her mother, her half-sister, her father, and finally her brother, all of whom she loved deeply. Those losses had a fundamental impact on her relationship to existence. On a political level then, because she’s thirty-two when World War I shatters Europe. When the shock and trauma of this conflict finally faded away, they only gave way to the rise of fascism of all kinds and to the threat of World War II. What I find fascinating about Virginia Woolf is the way those shocks and this instability were the source of her calling as a writer, and how she used them to create a literary work of magnificent poetry. The power of her work was long circumscribed to a poetry of interiority as conceived by a fragile and melancholy woman. I think it’s much more than that: Virginia Woolf set off on a literary quest of mad ambition, at once formal and political, deeply anchored in modernity. Freed from normative discourse, her novels are intense and absolute attempts to depict the human soul in all its multiplicity and complexity.
Time and its inexorable passage are at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s work. How did you translate that to the stage?
Throughout the show, we follow the story of a group of friends, as in a bildungsroman. Virginia Woolf was deeply influenced by the power and beauty of her childhood, and she ceaselessly referred to it in all her writings, both fictional and autobiographical. It’s in her early years that her inner landscape began to appear and, as an adult, she never really left it, revisiting it in a thousand different ways. With the actors and actresses of the show, we tried to invent rituals of childhood, signs that bind eternal friendships. Then, we worked together to understand how those friendships evolve when they encounter adulthood and its disillusions. I want the stage to reflect this apprenticeship, so I imagined a scenography that evolves as the inner worlds of the characters transform. I like the idea of giving people something to watch which embodies time, to have the stage change as stories unfold and cracks start to appear.
How would you describe the work you had to do for this adaptation in terms of writing—from English to French, from the novel to theatre?
It’s a very long process. Virginia Woolf’s writing is extremely dense and well-crafted, because she sees existence first and foremost as a sensory experience. She draws acute currents of consciousness, like so many crest line between the side of the mind and that of perception. Her work wasn’t made to be read aloud, she immerses us in the flow of the characters’ thoughts. To turn her writing into an oral show required a series of different experiments, starting with a thorough work of adaptation, then with improvisation sessions during the rehearsal period, followed by a period of rewriting. When we read a novel, words are the only limit: all of our mental space as readers can seize on what the words give us to read, on what they say, we can shape it with our own perspective, our imagination. But at the theatre, space and time are inscribed in the finiteness of the bodies of those who stand on the stage. Together, we tried to find a way for Virginia Woolf’s writing to become an extension of the actors and actresses, for it to become part of their flesh, their voices, their presence.
Interview conducted by Lucie Madelaine and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach