Playing Virginia proved to be at times quite challenging, as I had to think about how I was going to portray her. The things I had to think about whilst playing her was how she would sound, how would she walk, and how she would sit and stand. But because she died in 1941 and due to the fact that for the last 20 years of her life she was suffering mental health issues, their wasn’t any interviews of her out there that I could find to help me create a more believable character. So I practically created a character from scratch, and with the help of a few pictures and some of her poems I then started to bring her to life.
Rehearsal Process.
Over the weeks and months prior to the performance I started to quite intensively develop the character of Virginia. The things I worked on was
. Making my physicality more feminine.
. Changing the tone, pitch and texture of voice/ as well as applying a R.P accent. There were many accounts from people and various interviews with people online that knew Virginia and they all said that she speak in a quite rich and deep voice. So it was quite hard to create a voice which resembled that of a women, but more importantly a voice that was rich in texture and one that had a sense of pain to it.
. I also worked on her physicality, taking into account how she would sit and stand. For this I simply took a more feminine stance whilst I performed, and I decided that I would stoop more whilst stood. I thought that this would work well as I wanted to portray a women who appeared to have the wait of the world on her shoulders, and a women who was waited down by her unhappiness and dissatisfaction with her life.
. I also worked on harnessing the relevant emotions for the performance. This was at times hard as Virginia was an extremely troubled women, who’s mental state was deteriorating fast. However, I didn’t want to portray her as a women who was emotionally unstable, as her suicide was described as by many scholars as been “Spiritual” which is probably the reason why many writers have used her as inspiration for their characters.