Virginia Woolf’s only play was written as a comedy performed by and for friends, seemingly full of inside jokes, nevertheless quite entertaining and based on surprisingly accurate historical facts. The play is about Woolf’s great-aunt, Julia Cameron, photographer; and her highly intellectual friends, Alfred Tennyson, the poet, and G. F. Watts, the painter. She pokes fun at Tennyson’s morbid themes and long poems, and their symbolism, such as wings (off a turkey). There is a porpoise, a marmoset, and the Queen herself. Woolf’s friends must have had great fun. ( )

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