Flora Wilson Brown's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves is vibrant and glittering, effortlessly capturing the strange warp and weft of the novel in a new form. Rating
Unmissable!
Director Júlia Levai turns Flora Wilson Brown‘s beautiful adaptation of Virginia Woolf‘s The Waves into a complex, writhing celebration of human relationships. Movement, pace and vocality are precisely shaped by the delicacy of the language, and spectacular performances across the board meant that by the end of the play I was hungry to go back to the beginning and watch it all again.
All the actors take the problem of aging easily in their stride, depicting six -year-olds with joyful erraticism and fifty-year-olds with the weight of experience and yearning for their mythologised younger selves, all whilst successfully preserving a cohesive sense of character at each incremental age jump.
Ria Zmitrowicz brings a painful tenderness to Rhoda, able to portray strength and vulnerability in the same moment and guide the audience effortlessly through the narrative. Zmitrowicz builds to Rhoda’s ending with a light touch, able to make death inevitable and a complete surprise all at once.
Breffni Holahan can turn any line into a comedic beat, consistently hilarious but never failing to preserve an emotional nuance in her performance, so that the slightest flicker in Susan’s extroverted outer layer is enough to turn the tone of an entire scene.
Syakira Moeladi as Jinny is vibrant and a joy to watch, and she plays into the character’s vain streak to great effect. Tom Varey’s Bernard is endearing in his every line, with clumsy lovability played to perfection.
Louis, played by Archie Backhouse, is blunt and charmingly awkward, and feels as if he is caught up in a strange current leading to Rhoda from the very beginning. This is a particularly effective addition by this production, where the book only references their relationship briefly in a few lines. Backhouse is effortlessly comfortable onstage, exerting a precise control over both his manner and the audience; acting, to him, seems as simple as breathing.
Pedro Leandro grows into his character beautifully. That character, Neville, is not a central figure in the first part of the play, but Leandro seeps into the fabric of the production gradually, his portrayal of Neville’s ever-growing love for Percival tender and charming, building audience allegiance to him moment by moment. The slowly growing picture of the character’s inner world comes to a climax after Percival’s accident, where Neville’s previous subtlety and charm are washed away with an outpouring of grief that leaves members of the audience in tears.
This adaptation works so well because, in places, it willingly sacrifices entirely verbatim dialogue from the book, in favour of providing a cohesive and engaging story for the audience to follow. Adjustments, like ageing the characters up slightly by the end of the play, and adding some depth to Rhoda and Louis’ relationship, do not abandon Woolf, but build on her work to create a stageable homage to the original. Emotional tracks and relationship dynamics stand the test of form transference and become the centre to a beautifully written, directed and performed production. Grief, in this production, is palpable and strange, and the audience is left floating in it, adrift in memory and pain, when the lights dim for the final time.
Adapted by Flora Wilson Brown from the novel by Virginia Woolf
Directed by Júlia Levai
Set Design by Tomás Palmer
Costume Design by Anett Black
Lighting Design by Lucía Sánchez Roldán
Sound Design by Matthew Tuckey
The Waves plays at Jermyn Street Theatre until Saturday 23 May
