'The Hours', a near-perfect offering from the Grec Festival

Three women from three different decades in different cities and three lives marked by a novel: Mrs. DallowayThree lives encrypted in a few hours, like in Virginia Woolf's novel. Mrs. DallowayThe other is that of Mrs. Laura Brown in 1949, when she is reading Virginia Woolf's book and preparing a birthday party for her husband. The third is that of Clarissa Vaughn in 2001, when she goes to see her friend and childhood sweetheart, the poet Richard, who has just received an important literary prize while battling a very aggressive AIDS disease.

Michael Cunningham's novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and adapted into a celebrated film by Stephen Daldry in 2002, for which Nicole Kidman won an Oscar, is reflected in Woolf's life. It reflects the daily and emotional situations of the three protagonists, as well as those of the secondary characters, with whom Woolf's protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, lives.

The version by the current director of the International Theater Amsterdam (ITA), heir to Ivo Van Hove's Toneelgroep, Eline Arbo, goes to the core of the original to illuminate the portraits of these women and their desire for freedom. It logically includes the lesbianism that nests within them (how sweet Laura's stolen kiss with neighbor Kitty is), just as the possibility of a liberating suicide nestles within them. She introduces the figure of the author/narrator and closes the performance with the opening of the novel: Woolf's suicide. A powerful image for a proposal carefully curated to the extreme in every aspect that seeks to move from a calculated distance. The rotating stage space that incorporates the women's life spheres is magnificent, as are the performances. The sound space, mostly live (why don't they translate the song lyrics?), repetitive and radical, maintains the tension, and the imaginative and agile direction of the Norwegian Arbo Stage (1986), a literary technique based on the stream of consciousness of the original, is very interesting. A nearly perfect proposal that does not exempt one from reading the novel for a greater understanding.