Published in 1927 as her tenth book, it is less a fictional narrative than a portrait of a marriage - that of Virginia Woolf’s parents. Haunted by her memories of the happy summers the family spent in a ramshackle house near St Ives, overlooked by the Godrevy lighthouse, the novel is an attempt to come to terms with the complexities of family life - its “house full of unrelated passions” as Virginia Woolf puts it. And, as in all her books, plot is of less significance than an exploration of the inner lives of her characters.

Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children are staying in a creaking old house on the isle of Skye with a full complement of house guests from London. James, the youngest child, has been promised a trip to the Lighthouse but is thwarted by the weather. Ten years later they return - minus Mrs Ramsay who has died (as have two of her children) - and James eventually gets to see the Light.

That’s it. And that’s all the book needs, for To the Lighthouse is a superb demonstration of Virginia Woolf’s ability to capture a moment, suspended in time like “a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net”.

So can such a collection of moments be fashioned into a stage play? It’s a question I put to Julia Limer, who has adapted the book for the Empty Space Theatre Company, whose production is currently at the Lyric Studio in Hammer smith. “Well, you can’t put the whole world of the novel on to the stage, but you can present a reading of the novel, an interpretation.

“If you look at the characters on stage, their external characteristics, and then start a debate about what’s going on inside them, you can create an interesting tension, which is inherently dramatic. Like in Chekhov, we studied the depths below what you see on the surface.”

Andrew Holmes, the director of Empty Space, agrees that Chekhov is a helpful analogy. “Getting to the Lighthouse is a bit like getting to Moscow. It’s more of a symbol in that it’s not a story about going to a lighthouse in an actual, physical sense. It’s not a journey of understanding from A to B, but rather a circling around of moments of being, a mining down into the depths of a person.”

To discover these depths, Empty Space held a two-week workshop with Julia Limer. Their first exercise was to take a scene from the novel, and then to play it in six different ways.

One version would just use the dialogue from the scene (“it was hopeless, ” says Limer. “If you only use the dialogue, all you end up with is a five-minute play”); another would simply be a set of stage directions; another would use music to express what the characters are thinking.

What emerged was a play that is partly conventional - using monologues and stage asides - and partly experimental. At key moments the characters break into song to give voice to their strongest feelings, while the four members of the cast also work together as a chorus commenting on what has happened and conjuring up the briny atmosphere evoked by the novel.

It’s one way of meeting the challenge of making dramatic and visible the interior world of the novel, and of moving the focus of attention from one character to another. Limer says, “There is no single eye in To the Lighthouse. I think someone once said that Virginia Woolf’s writing is like a lighthouse - the beam comes from one set of eyes and passes into another set of eyes and finally into a soul.”

Mrs Ramsay dominates the book - the perfect model of Victorian womanhood, beautiful, motherly, devoted to her husband and loved by everyone. Or is she? Mr Ramsay is bewitched by his wife’s “astonishing beauty” but he is also irritated by her feminine vagueness and preoccupation with the family.

Lily Briscoe, the spinster artist who spends her summers with the Ramsays, is also not always so enchanted with her, and in this she represents the emerging new woman of the 1920s, determined to work and to satisfy her creativity by painting.

“Lily is the one big link,” says Limer. “She’s a metaphor for Virginia Woolf herself. As the novelist is writing her novel, so Lily is painting her picture. And, as the novel is finished, so Lily eventually finds within herself the power to complete her painting - and to look at it.”

Poised against these two archetypes of the feminine is the huge masculine personality of Mr Ramsay - the tyrannical father who blights James’s dream of going to the Lighthouse, the difficult self-absorbed husband, the agile philosopher.

The tension between these two, between the masculine and the feminine, at times conflicting and at times converging, is played out not just within the bustling life of the family but also against an elemental background - the sea, the lighthouse sending out light into the darkness beyond, the notion of Time and our struggles to make a mark on the universe.

Whether such a visionary book can ever be successfully realised on stage is doubtful. To dramatise is somehow to diminish its complexity, to iron away its subtleties, to reduce it to an exercise in precious prose. But the four actors of Empty Space - Steph Bramwell, Pete Cranmer, Victoria Plum and Jim Pyke - have made a valiant attempt to remain true to the spirit of Virginia Woolf.

At the Lyric Theatre Studio, Hammersmith, west London, until January 28 (tickets: 081 741 2311 ). From February 1 to February 26 at the Warehouse, Croydon (tickets: 081 680 4O60) before touring to Glasgow and the Midlands (tour details: 081 740 7115).