The Waves
Virginia Woolf’s towering 1931 novel The Waves doesn’t offer Joycean levels of formal complexity. Nonetheless, its haunting modernist blend of poetry and novel that sketches out the lives of six – or perhaps seven – friends is not a simple read. But it goes down surprisingly smoothly in this stage adaptation by Flora Wilson Brown.
And that’s all to the good: The Waves is so purely literary that I don’t think an entirely equivalent stage version is possible. But Brown’s text and Julia Levai’s deft, efficient production conventionalise it with love and brisk purpose.
Part of that is simply down to having a superb cast, who inject warmth and feeling into Woolf’s lengthy poetic soliloquies, whose mannered language holds the characters at an intentional remove on the page. We do get plenty of Woolf’s original poetry. But Brown is fearless about chopping and changing: she has added lashings of dialogue (the novel is essentially one character talking after another), and has rearranged things to make the autobiographical character of Rhoda the effective main narrator.
This is a clever move for a number of reasons, the most pragmatic of which is that it means the production gets the most value out of its Rhoda, the excellent Ria Zmitrowicz, in her first stage performance in years. She’s wonderful as an introspective, panic-attack prone outsider, happy to hover quietly around the margins of her group of friends, some of whom – gorgeous good-time socialite Jinny (Syakira Moeladi) and...