ABSTRACT
Chapter I, ‘Bioplay(giarism)s’, examines several bioplays: Eileen Atkins’s Vita and Virginia (1995), Edna O’Brien’s Virginia: A Play (1981), Elizabeth Steele’s Virginia Woolf and Companions: A Feminist Document. A Play (1996) and Maureen Duffy’s A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square (1972). It focuses on the playwrights’ ingenious intertextual methods of production of their bioplays, from an artisanal, playful bricolage, which consists in cutting and welding together bits and pieces of authentic Woolfian primary sources in order to create a dialogic dramatic structure, to more imaginative bioplays, which rest on and prolong Woolf’s original poetic images. Finally, Christine Orban’s narrative tools in Virginia et Vita (2014) allow her to fictionalise Woolf’s life and work and delve into Virginia’s consciousness. All these authors, obsessed with and possessed by the authorial figure, offer new, made-to-measure ‘Virginias’ who are reconstructed with old material borrowed from Woolf. Their artistic endeavours amount to both a creative and a therapeutic exercise, as they make Woolf come back to life in order to make peace with her.
