See, I could tell the actors were all working really hard. And I could really see that Katie Mitchell was working hard and had even co-credited her cast with the material they'd produced, which is a huge advance in honesty many other devising/making-theatre directors really ought to take notice of. There was certainly interesting stuff going on with video (though I've seen the same, with a far smaller budget, and just as well done in my mate Angela Clerkin's solo show) and sound (then again, nothing you wouldn't see in a BBC radio drama studio any day of the week) and at least they weren't just effects on stage for the sake of making it all look prettier, which is far too common. And while some of the audience (two middle aged women in our row for eg) left at the interval, many others stayed and seemed to love the piece. But … the problem for me was what wasn't there. Namely story, plot, character, sense of humour. (I don't mean jokes, I mean a certain levity, a warmth, a sense of not taking it all so bloody seriously every damn minute.) Basically nothing really happened, and I think I know why. Go to the source - Virginia-my-cosseted-life-is-hell-Woolf.

Yes, A Room of One's Own is good. Fine. Valuable. Aware. But the actual fiction? I don't get it. I've never got it. Nothing happens. Nothing bloody happens. For pages. Woolf was right, Katherine Mansfield is way better. Cleverer, funnier, smarter. And less damn moany. The thing is, when you consider what else was going on in her time, the First World War (which absurdly was not even mentioned in the National's The Waves), universal suffrage, the depression, the rise of fascism, it becomes increasingly hard to take her small women with their small middle class lives seriously. Of course she had a hard emotional life. Of course she suffered from depression and the repressed sexuality that was a by-product of her time. But so did any number of other people, some of them artists, none of whom have been accorded quite so many 'passes' by either their contemporaries or subsequent fans. A pass on the accusation of anti-semitism. A pass on the accusation of being a snob. A pass on the accusation of selfishness. There's a hilarious line in the Wikipedia entry on Woolf that says she was depressed during WW2 by the bombing of her homes. Homes! Well, my mother was bombed out of three places she was living, one after the other, during WW2, lost everything three times, and she didn't have another London home or a house in the country to escape to. And plenty of people suffered far worse than that in both Britain and mainland Europe. So is it enough to say Woolf's blatant self-interest and constant introspection is excused by her illness? I don't think so. For all the depression, she was still living an enormously privileged life. A privileged life which was probably no good for her at all. Perhaps the necessity of making money, or taking care of others, or anything that might have distracted her from her own pain, could have helped. Depression, like addiction, is usually a very self-centred disease. By its very nature the sufferer can often do nothing but focus on their own pain. Which is enormously distressing for the person with the illness and for those who love them. But in the end, I really don't believe extreme introspection makes for good theatre. For most of us, the simple expression of pain is not enough. We all understand pain, what we ask of art is that it helps us make sense of it, or at least tries to. And story is how we human beings make sense of everything. Spectacle is not enough.