It’s 1905, the father is dead, a caricature aunt is thrown out of the house protesting about decorum, and the Stephen sisters can now, in their mid-20s, invent their own sort of freedom. The first episode in this Bloomsbury drama is about efforts to undo Victorian lacing, a theme established literally when Vanessa (not yet Vanessa Bell) takes off her corset and, for good measure, Virginia (not yet Virginia Woolf) throws hers out of the window.
Points have to be made concisely because there is a lot to get through. Here comes the whole entourage of Cambridge men – Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes; here is Duncan Grant, whose combination of ease and longing is attractively interpreted by James Norton. There’s a two‑minute trip to Constantinople and a moment’s soft-focus honeymoon. When Thoby Stephen dies, there is only time to ask “What shall we do?”
What Virginia actually did was to pretend he was still alive. But that was ghostly fiction, and this show’s central subject is honesty. This is feelingly developed in the small gestures of Vanessa’s unselfconscious bathing and breast-feeding, as much as in her acceptance of open marriage. Virginia, played with panache by Lydia Leonard, wants to say more than she’s allowed. “Dear God, let me have a fantasy or a joke,” she might at any moment cry out to screenwriter Amanda Coe. But this would be against the wishes of Vanessa, who is keen for her to shut up.
It all feels very much like period drama; women think while brushing their hair in the mirror. Visually, it is elegantly subdued: the interiors are Hammershøi paintings, which must have been more to the taste of Swedish director Simon Kaijser than ebonised Victoriana or modernist high colour.
Life in Squares gives us, as yet, little sense of why Vanessa might paint in circles, or that Virginia will write novels with purple triangles more fascinating than most ménages à trois. Never mind. It is intelligent and humane. Ambitiously polyhedral portraits are emerging. Leonard and Vita are glimpsed in the distance for the second episode.
• Life in Squares begins on BBC2 on 30 July.
