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 suave gay poet Neville (Pedro Leando) – eventually find great success and happiness. And her nervy constant presence gives The Waves both edge and some smart late twists as she becomes more central to the group later on.
So yes, it all flows smoothly but it’s still The Waves: it still poignantly maps out six people’s lives from childhood innocence to adult certainty to the fracturing of those certainties in middle age. And it’s still haunted by the ‘seventh’ member of the group, Percival, who has no lines of his own in the book and has no actor playing him here, but is the hero and idol of the rest, and whose absence in the second half of the story leaves a void that is never filled.
With its £30 tickets and big hitter, decent-sized casts Jermyn Street has become a sort of ‘super fringe’ theatre. Crucially, it is still a fringe theatre, and if The Waves was adapted for a subsidised stage I’d probably say it needed a bit more flair – Tomas Palmer’s silvery backdrop set doesn’t exactly thrill; you can probably imagine somebody like Katie Mitchell conveying more of the otherness of the source material. But if being in a fringe theatre lets it duck certain expectations then that’s all to the good – this is a fine adaptation with a tremendous cast.
