'Woolf Works' review — Wayne McGregor’s impassioned response to Virginia Woolf's writing

Read our review of Woolf Works, now in performances at the Royal Opera House to 13 February.

Summary

• Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works was first seen in 2015
• McGregor has adapted three of Woolf's novels including Mrs Dalloway; Orlando and The Waves
• Newcomers like Fumi Kaneko were joined by established dancers like Natalia Osipova and Marcelino Sambé

The word made flesh takes on renewed meaning when it comes to Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s impassioned response to the writing of Virginia Woolf. First seen in 2015, since which time McGregor has been knighted, this singular triptych has clearly earned an important place within the repertoire of the Royal Ballet, if its heartfelt opening night ovation was any gauge (the ballet will be screened in cinemas on 9 February).

Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves – the Woolf works under consideration here – have all been adapted to varying degrees before and will continue to be so: Jermyn Street Theatre, indeed, opens its own take on the modernist landscape of Woolf’s prismatic 1931 novel, The Waves, in April.

But seeing them filleted in quick succession, and given bodily form, only amplifies one’s appreciation of a writer whose spirit of literary adventure finds its choreographic complement in McGregor, a keen neuroscientist who roams freely among ABBA and Sondheim and on to installation art and new plays at the Royal Court.

Of the three titles, Mrs Dalloway might seem the least likely candidate for dance in its depiction of a single day in June 1923 during which Clarissa Dalloway traverses London in advance of a party that same evening.

In fact, I now, I then, as the novel is here tellingly renamed, starts with a sonic immersion in a 1937 recording of Woolf for the BBC that here proceeds to elide the author with her creation, Clarissa Dalloway, even as the day’s reveries commingle past and present. Natalia Osipova communicates a heroine burdened by memory, any giddiness all too fleetingly apparent set against life’s abrasions and the pulsating clangour – Big Ben included – of Max Richter’s gorgeously enveloping score, conducted by Koen Kessels.

The geometric sets by Ciguë serve as portals through which pass, among many others, Sally Seton (Leticia Dias), with whom Clarissa shares a kiss, and the shellshocked WW1 veteran Septimus Smith (Marcelino Sambé, in bruising form), whose pain seems in some way to prefigure Woolf’s own distress.

Those unfamiliar with the novel may at times be puzzled – Eileen Atkins’s empathic 1998 film adaptation is worth honouring at this juncture – but Osipova is riveting throughout as she bustles between an unforgiving urban environment that pays her no heed and the haunted recesses of lived experience: the sad eyes near the finish say it all.

Becomings, by contrast, offers the sort of kinetic, high-wire experience you could imagine as a curtain-raiser for ABBA Voyage, the laser beam intensity of Lucy Carter’s lighting made to order for an arena setting; so too are the surging variations on La Folia that make up Richter’s aurally encompassing score. It makes sense that the source of this middle piece should be Woolf’s radical Orlando (1928), whose time-traveling, gender-fluid playfulness finds McGregor in springy, propulsive form.

The tightly drilled ensemble conjoins dancers from I now, I then with invaluable newcomers to the evening like Fumi Kaneko. A glisteningly attired, androgynous company comes at this fizzy historical whirligig (the purposefully abstract designs are from We Not I) with unbridled audacity – a hurtling paean to life amidst a trio of adaptations defined largely by loss.

And so we finish with Tuesday, which dispenses with the six blended stories from the actual novel of The Waves to tell Woolf’s own. Gillian Anderson is heard reciting Woolf’s suicide note to her husband Leonard as waves (courtesy Ravi Deepres) are seen unfurling in monochrome projections of the sea above the stage. These waters would, of course, lead Woolf toward her suicide in 1941, age 59.

Children join a gathering throng of stage activity that constitutes a collective wave of its own, Osipova here returned as Woolf to partner William Bracewell in a rending duo between an anxiously supportive husband and his anguished wife. The two seem movingly indissoluble in the most emotionally expressive passages of the evening. That is until such time as one of the two can carry on no longer and it’s left to the sea to take her away.

Woolf Works is at the Royal Opera House to 13 February. Book Woolf Works tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Woolf Works (Photos by Johan Persson)