RSC Takes On Woolf and Clarke: Mrs Dalloway and Piranesi Head to Stratford

The Royal Shakespeare Company will stage Virginia Woolf's 1925 classic Mrs Dalloway and Susanna Clarke's 2020 award-winning novel Piranesi — two experimental books written almost a century apart that pose, in the company's own words, "a century-old theatrical preoccupation: the exploration of inner life on stage".

Co-artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey announced the adaptations as part of a season that also features Elizabeth Debicki as Richard II and Damien Molony as Coriolanus.

Harvey will direct Mrs Dalloway herself, in an adaptation by Zoe Cooper. She did not understate the difficulty of the task. "It would be 'hugely challenging' to 'bring the inside out' from Woolf's novel," she said.

The novel presents a structural puzzle for any adaptor. Woolf tells the story of a single day through stream of consciousness, as Clarissa Dalloway prepares and gives a party whose guests' thoughts intermingle with her own. Nothing in it sits still: the narrative flows between minds, between present moments and remembered histories.

Cooper, according to Harvey, has found a theatrical answer. "She 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'," Harvey said.

Mrs Dalloway opens at the Swan Theatre in April. It arrives amid a surge of interest in the novel on English stages. The production will be the third major adaptation staged in England within a year: Kit Green's one-woman performance recently completed a tour, and Holly Robinson's new version opens at the Yard Theatre in London in March.

The pairing with Piranesi signals the RSC's appetite for formally demanding prose. Clarke's novel, an otherworldly meditation on memory and isolation set in a labyrinthine house of statues and tides, won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021. Evans and Harvey placed both novels in a shared lineage of work that wrestles with interiority — the same problem, they suggest, that has preoccupied theatre-makers for a hundred years.

The season as a whole stakes out the Evans-Harvey programme at Stratford: Shakespeare's histories anchored by high-profile casting — Debicki, fresh from her award-winning screen work, as Richard II, and Molony as Coriolanus — flanked by literary adaptation of real ambition.

Whether audiences will follow the RSC into the minds of Clarissa Dalloway and Piranesi's unnamed narrator will become clear in April, when the Swan Theatre opens its doors on Woolf's single June day.