The Hours

In 1923, Virginia Woolf begins writing the book that will become her masterpiece: Mrs Dalloway. Thirty years later, in a stifling American suburb, housewife Laura Brown is reading that same book and feels the walls of her seemingly perfect life closing in on her. Fifty years after that, in New York, Clarissa Vaughan is preparing a party for her terminally ill friend Richard, while questioning whether the life she has built is in fact the one she wanted.

Three women, three eras, connected through literature and through a longing for freedom. They struggle with the roles assigned to them — as wife, as mother, as woman. Each searching for her own escape. That pursuit comes with consequences, both for themselves and for those around them.
 

Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours and its film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep have become modern classics. In her theatrical adaptation, Eline Arbo highlights what binds the three storylines: the progress in emancipation that has both been made and not made over the past century, and the gender roles that remain deeply ingrained in our culture. Here, the personal is inseparable from the political — a recurring thread throughout her work.