Performed impressively as a one-woman show by Kara Wilson, Bloomsbury Bell tells the tale of author Virginia Woolf through the eyes of her artist sister, Vanessa Bell, who paints a portrait of her younger sister a few years after Virginia’s suicide.
The monodrama entails Bell talking to a smaller sketch of her sister whilst preparing to paint a portrait in commemoration of her sister, as she reminisces on the sisters’ shared memories together from childhood to adulthood. With both being the heart of the influential Bloomsbury Group, you can guess that there would be many tales to tell, including stories of their father’s death, their brother’s Cambridge friends, and their later marriages in life — all these tales being based on Jane Dunn’s book Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy.
Wilson’s acting is incredible and to the point of perfection, as she fully embodies the essence of Vanessa Bell. While she conveys her words of soliloquy to the audience beautifully, there is a combined sense of both poise and confidence.
It would be unwise not to bring up the elephant in the room, which is, of course, Wilson’s ability to paint a detailed oil painting portrait of Woolf whilst simultaneously acting in front of an audience. Before the performance, I was expecting Wilson’s unique genre of “painter play” to be an hour of her acting, but mostly focused on her painting. I was quickly proven wrong when witnessing her perfect balance of the two art forms: acting and painting. The manner she presents her one-woman show is art in itself, by how she conveys emotions gracefully, creating such an extraordinary way to learn about the lives of creative figures (instead of hearing someone just dump historical information).
Watching this performance made me want to hold my sister a little closer, as Wilson’s good-paced writing perfectly conveys both the beauty and difficulty of sisterhood. She presents the sisters in such a natural manner, from how Bell humorously addresses Woolf as “goat”, and how the female protagonist exclaims, “We have the same eyes, but different spectacles”. All in all, Bloomsbury Bell is a faultless display of bringing a sense of humanity to iconic figures that feel so distant from us in the 21st century, providing elements of domesticity and nostalgia to a modern-day audience.
Image by Kara Wilson, provided to The Student as press.