I have never learned to love Virginia Woolf. A writer who can dismiss Ulysses as an "illiterate, underbred book" and deride Arnold Bennett as a provincial realist is not one I warm to. But if anyone can force me to look afresh at the supercilious Bloomsburyite, it's Eileen Atkins, who here revives her magnificent performance of one of the classic feminist set texts.
Woolf's A Room of One's Own was based on lectures on women and fiction given at Cambridge in 1928; Patrick Garland's adaptation and production shrewdly return the text to its source. We become undergraduates listening to Woolf's persuasive mix of polemic, personal plea and practical criticism. It's impossible to gainsay her central argument: that there's a vital link between economic security and artistic creativity, and that history is a largely male construct that has traditionally marginalised women.
You could say that many of Woolf's battles have been won. But Atkins invests the text with a silvery irony and wan reflectiveness that make it much more than a piece of propaganda. Her touch is brilliantly light. When she describes the drab austerity of dinner in a women's college, it's with a feathery disgust; when she talks of "the reprehensible poverty of our sex", her tone is mock-reproachful. All this makes the moments of passion even more powerful: the famous invocation of Shakespeare's hypothetical, disregarded sister is accompanied by a widening of the eyes and a fierce intensity of speech.
And like all great actresses, Atkins combines sensitivity to language with an indefinable moral quality, seizing on relevant words, giving every syllable due weight. I went nursing all my old prejudices about Woolf's snobbery and hauteur, but Atkins and Garland dented them severely and sent me out with a heightened awareness of Woolf's subversive irony and sheer aesthetic skill.
Until December 8. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
