Zoe Cooper's new stage version of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway will run in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 16 April - 12 June 2027, directed by the RSC's co-artistic director Tamara Harvey.
Cooper is a former Writer-in-Residence at the RSC, and the production reaches the stage a little more than a hundred years after the novel was first published. Harvey shares the running of the company with Daniel Evans.
The story covers a single day in Westminster in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, a society hostess married into politics, is out buying flowers for the party she is giving that night. Septimus Warren Smith, a former soldier shattered by the First World War, is waiting to see his doctor. Their lives run separately, and as the hours pass to the strokes of Big Ben, stray conversations and passing sights stir up memories, longings and dread.
Cooper's version lets the characters move between the present and the past and drift into each other's thoughts. The RSC presents it as a study of inner lives, of the joy and pain of queer love, and of the pull people exert on one another, set in a city caught between one war and the unrest still to come.
The creative team is Anna Fleischle (set and costume), Ryan Day (lighting), Claire Windsor (sound), Lucie Pankhurst (movement), Elizabeth Freestone (dramaturg) and Charlotte Sutton CDG (casting). Casting has yet to be announced.
Priority booking opens on Monday 5 October 2026 and public booking on Wednesday 21 October. Mrs Dalloway was announced as part of the RSC's 2027 Stratford season.
