Virginia Woolf’s Suicide Letter To Husband (1941)

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V

 

 

Depression and performance

I find that the ideas often come at a distance  and theatre can have a tendency to orbit around ideas that reach them through secondary means: a news article, an image, some text, an internet broadcast, a cultural phenomenon. Ideas are comfortable when they remain at arm’s length – though I would argue that the task is to make theatre which highlights societies hang ups ; to allow ourselves and the audience to be discomfited  by close-up realities.

 

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