Following her honeymoon Virginia Woolf attempted suicide and was sent to recover at her half-brother’s estate, Dalingridge Hall.

CHARACTERS

Virginia Woolf: a sensitive young artist having a breakdown

Leonard Woolf: her new husband, nervous, forceful, an “outsider”

Dr. Craig: bluff, elderly, genial, doctor to the wealthy

Dr. Hyslop: a fashionable eugenicist

Two orderlies: rough & tumble Cockneys ALF & BOB (orderlies & doctors played by the same actors)

(Scene 1: Dalingridge Hall, An ostentatious faux British castle with all the updated luxurious mod-cons. A pair of white-coated orderlies maneuver a stretcher into a sickroom.)

ALF
Hold up a mo, let’s have a fag.

BOB
Buckle her in, and then we’ll have a fag.

ALF
Now that’s right stupid, that is. Tie her up, the job is done. No time for a fag then.

BOB
Oh, right. I get you. Where can we stow her? She’s heavy.

ALF
Tall as a man and strong like one, so they say. Prop her up over here. Careful, now, you got me shin!

(They lean the stretcher against the wall facing the audience. Fumble with cigarette packs. ALF sits on the bed.)

BOB
I don’t like her looking at us.

ALF
Oh, she’s well out of it. Off to dreamland. Took the mickey out of her, they did.

BOB
So what’s up with this one? Trying on hats and ordering jewelry too much for her?

ALF
I heard it was her honeymoon what sank her!

BOB
Oh, Lord!

(they both guffaw)

BOB
Wonder it doesn’t happen routine-like, what with the shock and all. I mean, she’s not used to seeing the farm animals getting frisky in the spring. She’s not walking to church with the village lads. She’s not sharing a bed with the brothers and sisters. So everything seems right and proper until the big night and then –

ALF
All hell breaks loose!

(they laugh uproariously)

BOB
So, you seen the husband?

ALF
Oh yes, he was hanging about. Wringing his hands.

BOB
So what’s he look like, then? One of them muscle-bound rowing blues?

ALF
No, no, no. Nervy bloke. Just back from the East where he’d been sorting out the blacks.

BOB
Oh, Lord! Used to carrying a big stick is he?

(they gasp, cough, laugh and fall about)

VIRGINIA

(groggily)

What is this place? What vast forces of good and evil dropped me here? I burn, I shiver. I turn, I tumble, I am stretched. I am nailed like a stoat to the stable door.

ALF
Oh my jugs and jiggers, she’s coming out of it. Look here, you take that end.

BOB
Hold her up, hold her up!

ALF
She’s heavy, I’m telling you. They feed them women up like Strasbourg geese. Look sharp now.

BOB
There’s hell to pay if she’s not buckled in.

(They get her on the bed. Much buckling and strapping.)

VIRGINIA
Who are you? Where am I? I have been diving through seas of horror to come up rotting in dirty ditchwater. Don’t touch me!

(She starts struggling when it’s too late. She’s already buckled in. The men rest, gratified but exhausted.)

ALF
Nothing to fear, my lady. You’re all right now. You’re safe here at Dalingridge Hall.

(His last words reverential)

VIRGINIA
Dalingridge Hall! Now the agony begins, horror has seized me with its fangs! I am turned, I am tumbled, I am stretched and everyone pursuing!

(She starts screaming)

ALF
Hypo! We need a hypo!

(ALF and BOB rush about panicked. Enter LEONARD. Exit orderlies.)

LEONARD
What is it? What’s happened?

VIRGINIA
Dalingridge Hall! They’ve taken me to Dalingridge Hall!

LEONARD
Virginia, your brother Sir George and his wife Lady Margaret have kindly lent us this splendid mansion. They’re staying up in London and have left it all to us. Up to date comfort. Plenty of servants – French chef – the food is magnificent. Eleven bathrooms! Spotless, hygienic, – the nurses are impressed I can tell you.

VIRGINIA
Now this monstrous ugliness is explained. I hear the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest are rearing, plunging among the thorns. One has pierced me. One has driven deep within me. You have left me to undergo this squalid humiliation served out like soup by greedy, casual scullions, coarse, ogling, brushing, destroying everything, smearing even our love with impure fingers. “What is this secret sin, this untold tale, that art cannot extract nor penance cleanse?” Don’t you understand? ALL DEATHS ARE ONE DEATH.

LEONARD

Would you like to see Sir George?

VIRGINIA

George! That obese alligator who used to roll me round my bed of an evening as if I were a minnow shut up in a tank with a frenzied whale. I would rather touch a decaying dogfish than that man’s body.

LEONARD
Hush, Virginia. George is an Adonis, a true man of the world, adored by great ladies and parliamentarians alike.

VIRGINIA
George has the eyes of a sow! Or is it an elephant? Sows look so much like elephants on the Duckworth side of the family. He used to fondle me so I couldn’t read my Greek. The very locusts deform the trees with their lusts.

LEONARD
George claims chastity until hi marriage. That’s more than I managed.

VIRGINIA
What liars men are! George was a pig, snuffling, rolling, grabbing, calling me Beloved. How he tortured both of us, me and Vanessa alike, Greek slaves in the harem promised him by Eton. He smothered us with caresses until Nessa told Dr. Savage and Dr. Savage made him stop. George told Dr. Savage he was only comforting us for the illness of our father.

LEONARD
Virginia, you’re romancing. Dr. Head says longing for adult attention creates a wish-fulfillment leading to ideas like these. He says the only way out is the talking cure.

VIRGINIA
So it’s wish fulfillment that has trapped me in George’s house? Dr. Head is another booby, Leonard. We were right to dismiss him. He knows nothing.

(she grabs him)

Don’t you understand that we are poured to the very edge of the abyss, Leonard, where we shall be broken together into nothingness and flames? Help, help! Get me out of this thing!

LEONARD
Dearest, you threatened to harm yourself, remember? You attempted suicide.

VIRGINIA
You left the veronal unlocked. I thought it was an invitation. My father praised the Duke of Bedford for having the courage to shoot himself. Surely you longed to be rid of me. I’m a bad bargain all around.

LEONARD

No Virginia, no. I love you. I moved heaven and earth to save you.

VIRGINIA
But I’m already dead, Leonard. I am certainly in hell. Fallen in a duck pond and strangling in duckweed! Quack, quack!

LEONARD
Virginia, why do you reduce me to madness too? If you could only comprehend how insane you sound.

VIRGINIA
You can’t think what a raging furnace it is to me, madness and doctors and being forced. I am bent like a tree under a remorseless gale. The crass blindness that poisons childhood still threatens bitter storms. Children will be trodden under. Speech is false. The demand to submit must always be returned with cries of pain, hate and rage because that’s all they understand.

LEONARD
You were violent, Virginia. You attacked your nurses. Don’t you remember?

VIRGINIA
I was defending myself. They attacked me! Forcing food down my throat. I will go down with my colors flying. Father used to say, “Face the inevitable with eyes wide open.”

LEONARD
You vomited on Lily and you struck Susan with a platter of cold meat. You must eat to gain weight, Virginia. Then the voices will subside, the doctors say. That’s why they’ve ordered a rest cure.

VIRGINIA
Those doctors! My life is a constant fight against doctors’ follies. That cretin, Savage? He’s not fit to be about. Borrowed from another century.

LEONARD
Four doctors and all of them in agreement. You know this, Virginia. You chose Head yourself – because Roger Fry recommended him – Vanessa suggested Craig and I found Hyslop.

VIRGINIA
Really, a doctor is worse than a husband. I’ve given up expecting doctors to listen to reason. If only those pigheaded sawbones could see I speak the sober truth without excuse! Alienists know absolutely nothing. Their vanity is as profound as their ignorance. What does their “treatment” amount to? It is all eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark, sequestered with lunatics.

LEONARD
The food here is delicious. May I bring you some?

VIRGINIA
Once when we travelled by train to St. Ives the lemonade spilled on the sandwiches and turned them into mush but Nurse still made us eat them and I was sick and then I was punished. Leonard, don’t you see that when I am weighted with food I can no longer make the moments flow together. I become an excreter, an excretion. No, of course you don’t see. You’re in a conspiracy, plotting against me. I see your grinning, I know your subterfuge, I hear you sneering behind my back.

LEONARD
Virginia, the people who love you are trying to decide what’s best for you. I’m trying to make the best decisions I can.

VIRGINIA
You’re punishing me for disappointing you. For being a bad wife.

LEONARD
When you’re well, you admit you’ve been mad.

VIRGINIA
My sister wanted to be rid of me. While she threw away our father’s possessions I lay in bed and heard the birds singing Greek.

“What bird so sings, so yet does wail?
Tis the ravished nightingale
Jug, jug, jug, tereu she cries
And still her woes at midnight rise.”

LEONARD
You’re hurting yourself with all this wild talk. No one can understand anything you say.

VIRGINIA
People know very well enough but it’s a secret. King Edward spewed the foulest possible language amongst the azaleas and yet they crowned him. “Swallow, my sister, O Sister Swallow,” I sing. If I become king of the lunatics shall I escape molestation? God, I wish I were dead. I will soon have to jump out of a window.

LEONARD
These violent oscillations, Virginia! If I could only get you to see! A whirlwind brings madness in its wake!

VIRGINIA
How long can any man love a woman without driving her mad? How long can I protect my clean visions from the odious masculine point of view – from the egotism of men? You crack my brain like a thrush cracks a snail – hammer, hammer, hammer.

LEONARD
I am not your enemy, Virginia.

VIRGINIA
Then who else is? Why shouldn’t I be frightened? I wanted to spend my life innocently indifferent among the trees and rivers but instead men expose themselves whenever I step out doors. I saw a woman pinned beneath a car and horses falling in the street. Outside our scullery a man cut his own throat. His jowls were whitened as codfish. The human face is hideous. What are you doing? Don’t touch me!

LEONARD
Trying to loosen your straps. You’re getting excited. Doctor!