Freshwater (theater)

Freshwater is Virginia Woolf's only play . A first version of the comedy dates from 1923, a second version premiered in 1935 to a selected audience, Virginia Woolf himself directed, most of the cast were from the Bloomsbury group , including Woolf's husband Leonard , her sister Vanessa Bell , the painter Duncan Grant and other. The comic short piece (three acts) is a satire on the Victorian era. The 16-year-old actress Ellen Terry tries to escape her marriage to the much older painter George Frederick Watts . The plot also revolves around Virginia Woolf's great aunt, photographer Julia Margret Cameron , and her artist enclave on the Isle of Wight .

" Freshwater is a piece about a page of anecdotal, widely ramified family history. But at the same time it is (...) a mockingly loving reckoning with the constraints of the Victorian era from which Virginia Woolf had to suffer." (from the afterword by Klaus Reichert to Bloomsbury / Freshwater )

Farringford House, Baron Tennyson's home near Freshwater (ca.1910)

A Spanish translation had already appeared in 1980; a French edition, translated by Elisabeth Janvier, came out in 1982; in the same year there was a performance at the Center Pompidou . At a re-performance in Paris in the early 1980s were u. a. Eugène Ionesco , Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute involved; the first performance in Germany took place in Mainz in 1994 .

The 1935 revised version was performed off-Broadway together with the original version in 2009 . Charles Isherwood praised in the New York Times the wit of the piece.

In September 2017, Freshwater will be published by the Berlin-based AvivA Verlag in the German translation by the writer Tobias Schwartz , embedded in his frame piece entitled "Bloomsbury" about the bizarre premiere situation and provided with an afterword by Virginia Woolf editor Klaus Reichert .

literature

• Virginia Woolf: Freshwater: A Comedy . Edt Harcourt Inc, 1976, p. 86 (Ill. Edward Gorey ).
• Masami Usui: Julia Margaret Cameron as a Feminist Precursor of Virginia Woolf . Kyoto 2007 ( online [PDF]).
• Tobias Schwartz / Virginia Woolf: Bloomsbury / Freshwater . Berlin 2017. ( ISBN 978-3-932338-92-2 )

Web links

• Audio performance on May 16, 2012 ("Staged by Aoife Monks, program director of Birkbeck ’s MA Text and Performance (with RADA), featuring academic staff from the Department of English and Humanities")
• Jeff Lunden: In 'Freshwater,' A Lighter Side Of Virginia Woolf - NPR, Jan 25, 2009

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tobias Schwartz / Virginia Woolf: Bloomsbury / Freshwater . Ed .: AvivA Verlag.
2. ↑ Virginia Woolf would've loved NYU's 'Freshwater'
3. ^ Two Versions of Virginia Woolf's Freshwater Are Combined for World Premiere in NYC; Cast Announced ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ^ Proof That Virginia Woolf Did Have a Light Side