Vita & Violet

Synopsis

A fantasy over the complicated relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Violet Keppel (Trefusis) from 1904 to 1940 - in England, Scotland, Persia and France.



Comment

The story of a promising play meeting a number of unlucky coincidences

V&V started out as a commision from two actresses who wanted me to write a play about the love-affair betweenof Vita Sackville-West and Violet Keppel (Trefusis), so that they could get these great parts to play.

I wrote one first version in danish that the actresses started rehearsing at Mungo Park Theatre, while I moved to New York to study playwriting.

What actually happened during those rehearsals I never really found out, but for some reason they cancelled the show a few weeks before the planned opening. Meanwhile in New York I was rewriting the play in english and using it in my classes at Playwrights Horizons and Circle Rep. where I realized two things. One was that I loved writing in english. The other was that I apparently had a play on my hands that people liked. So after finishing the play and my classes I mailed the play to a couple of theatres, and soon got positive response from The Pride Theatre Ensemble in New York. They presented a wonderful reading of the play in april 1995, but unfortunately the ensemble ran into trouble so they never got around to producing the play. Rats.

Being back in Denmark working on other projects it seemed hopeless to start searching for other venues for the play. So the only thing I did was to enter it in the British Council Playwriting Competition in 1997 – where it went on the shortlist but unfortunately failed to get to the top.

Since then Vita & Violet have been resting in the drawer, which I still think is a shame, because the play does have some real potential in its rather unusual way of handling a timespan of 40 years. Not to mention the careful way in which it describes the constant ambivalence of the main character Vita Sackville-West.