Theatre

The idea of staging Virgina Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ – a novel both dauntingly diaphanous in texture and feverishly fragmented in structure –  seemed initially absurd, akin to trying to catch moonbeams with a colander. Although in essence the 1931 book follows the lives of six characters – Bernard, Rhoda, Jinny, Louis, Neville and Susan – it portrays them through fluidly interwoven soliloquies which follow the dart and dash of their random thoughts, leaving no strong impression of how they are viewed externally as characters.

Imagine, then, the miracle of encountering a production like Katie Mitchell’s, which flirts wittily with the fractured preoccupations of the modernist mindset. The stage is set up as if for a radio play, with a sparse forest of microphones, and shelves groaning dustily under the burden of objects used throughout to create sound effects.

Theatre’s not a naturally fluid medium, which is why it’s so clever that Mitchell sets up a framework based on soundwaves. A sudden change of mood can be vividly evoked, whether through a nightmarish subsonic rumble, or the plaintiff lament of a cello. Film cameras also project onto a screen emotionally vivid images, set up with self-conscious artifice on stage. So while, for example, on stage a man in black flaps a board in front of an actress, on screen she’s standing, hair blowing in the breeze, and suddenly it’s possible to feel all her fears and desperation.

‘It may be clever,’ some may say, ‘but what’s the point of following six solipsistic snobs when those early twentieth century decades were so politically dramatic?’ The point, one might reply, is that much of the early twentieth century’s energy came from a radical questioning of all certainties. Here Woolf pushes both the use of language and characterisation to its limits. A banana sequence aside, Mitchell brings that intellectual quest to exquisite theatrical life.