Edinburgh Fringe 2026
An Audience with Virginia Woolf: Writing One’s Mind
Lucy Stevens
Genre: Historical, New Writing, Solo Show
Venue: Assembly Rooms
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Woolf’s clarity on women when ‘writing one’s mind’, championed writers from our past to inspire the voices of our future. A new solo show written and performed by Lucy Stevens draws on a withering critique of patriarchy delivered by Virginia Woolf in 1931 alongside many of the writers Woolf admired and was influenced by.
Review
A simple set of a side table, a chair, and – of course – rather a lot of books greets us; the lighting implies a turn-of-the-century parlour. Virginia Woolf welcomes us and shares that she started her life as an author in her bedroom, writing, sending her work off to a magazine and, to her own surprise, receiving £1.10.6d in return. What she spent it on, you’ll have to see the show to discover.
From there she graduates to novels – though this is not a show that examines the novels themselves, so much as draws on them to reveal how far they were shaped by, and in turn reflect, her own life and experience.
An Audience with Virginia Woolf: Writing One’s Mind is a new solo show, written and performed by Lucy Stevens, which takes us on a journey around, rather than through, Woolf’s life and writing.
Building outward from the withering critique of patriarchy Woolf delivered in 1931, Stevens moves fluidly between writing and biography, hinting too at some of the more painful experiences of Woolf’s youth, and the compromises she made to fit the expectations of Edwardian society. The narrative, drawn entirely from Woolf’s own writing, touches on the struggles women writers have always faced – that niggling voice of doubt every woman writer admits lurks somewhere in the shadows. For Woolf it took the form of ‘the angel’, a presence she would think conquered only to have it creep back, whispering judgement.
Into this apparently artless, informal address – in reality tightly scripted, and packed with rather more than should comfortably fit into an hour – are woven reflections on, and readings from, the earlier women writers who influenced her. A programme handed out on the way in introduces nineteen of them; browse it while you wait, and don’t lose it, because you will likely find yourself hunting down several of these women afterwards. The final flourish is a handful of short, unaccompanied songs, drawn mostly from the poetic writing of Aphra Behn (1640–1689), set to tunes of the period.
Throughout, Stevens uses Woolf’s own words to make the case that she was only able to do the work she did by building on, and linking herself to, a long tradition of women before her – reaching as far back as Sappho, circa 620 BC. Stevens’s pace and delivery are impeccable, each thought seeming to trigger the next with complete ease, whether reading, reflecting, or pausing to sing.
Margarett Perry directs the show with a very light touch ensuring that what could feel very static or include unecessary movement feels completely natural.
‘Where truth is important, I prefer to write fiction’ says our hostess at one point. One has to take great care with the phrase ‘tour de force’, but here, Lucy Stevens gives us exactly that.
