The Virginia Woolf BBC Radio Drama Collection

Seven Full-Cast Dramatisations

By: Virginia Woolf

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Glenister, Laura Fraser, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Fenella Woolgar, Full Cast

The collected BBC radio adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering modernist novels, with star casts including Kristin Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar.

The Voyage Out
A sea voyage to South America turns into a journey of self-discovery for naïve Rachel Vinrace. Starring Laura Fraser, Rebecca Johnson and Bertie Carvel.

Night and Day
In pre-First World War London, aristocrat Katharine Hilbery and suffragette Mary Datchet have their assumptions about love challenged. Starring Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece charts one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares to host an important party. Starring Fenella Woolgar.

To the Lighthouse
Centring around a summer home on Skye, Virginia Woolf’s landmark tale follows the Ramsay family and their guests before and after World War I. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson and Robert Glenister.

Orlando
The adventures of time-travelling, gender-swapping poet Orlando, who is born male in Elizabethan England and dies female over 300 years later. Starring Jennie Stoller and David McAlister.

The Waves
In this radical ‘play-poem’, six characters look back on their childhood and first forays into adulthood, and reflect on the loss of their friend Percival. Starring Geraldine James and Anna Massey.

Between the Acts
An eccentric artist devises a pageant celebrating English history – but it is 1939, and the shadow of war hangs over England’s present. Starring Sarah Badel.

©2019 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2019 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Updated with Chapter Titles!

Thank you to the publisher for adding the chapter titles. It’s made the listening experience so much better, especially since I fully intend on returning to all of these stories. Yay!

Woolf + BBC = Masterpiece!

this recording is flawless. I loved it! perfect for walking and gardening and cleaning closets on a rainy day.

Atrocious changes to the text of Mrs Dalloway

They made quite a few changes. I’ll only mention a few, most egregious: Clarissa feels "If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy." It’s not about her party (in the present), and she doesn’t say it to her husband, who actually is made to answer that it is rather morbid. The real text goes on: “That was her feeling – Othello's feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!” Ghastly. No one would have done this, say, to Shakespeare himself, or any number of classics of literature. They also erased in toto Sally’s feelings about Clarissa’s all in white, and, too, about absence and distance, at the end. Just as they botched Septimus’ story and Clarissa’s final thoughts about him.