Mrs Dalloway review – Virginia Woolf’s party planner plays all the roles herself

Storyhouse, ChesterKit Green takes on all the characters in an imaginative interpretation of the 1925 day-in-the-life novel As Clarissa Dalloway wafts about the stage, welcoming her audience indiscriminately before instigating party games, the essence of Virginia Woolf’s scrupulous socialite appears to be missing. But this stage adaptation – co-written by Jen Heyes, who directs, and Kit Green, who performs – is a playful re-examination of the novel, wrapped up as a multimedia-driven solo show. Heyes has been experimenting with cine-theatre for some time. The format evokes the work of Australian director Kip Williams, though it’s simpler than his West End blockbusters, Sarah Snook’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula. In Heyes’s production, featuring Monika Koeck’s video design, Green’s Clarissa similarly interacts with many characters on screen, who she also portrays. Among them are her husband Richard, her old friend Sally Seton, the maid Lucy, and PTSD-suffering war veteran Septimus. Each character study is attentive: Peter Walsh, another old friend, is forever fiddling with his pocketknife while agonising over what could have been. When we r