Waves

Synopsis

In the beginning, there was a nursery, with windows opening on to a garden and beyond that the sea. A fragmented and dreamlike tale of friendship, loss, identity and love. Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance shaped like a glove, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story so that when one matter is despatched - love for instance - we go on in an orderly manner, to the next. A multi-media production. A fragmented and dreamlike tale of friendship, loss, identity and love.

Our Review:

28 August 2008

NOTE: This review dates from November 2006 and this production's original run at the National Theatre. Some casting has changed.

Director Katie Mitchell and her colleagues – eight actors, four musicians, designer Vicki Mortimer, lighting designer Paule Constable, tap-dance coach Donna Berlin – have been making Waves from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel about a group of six friends free-associating in what Woolf herself described as “dramatic soliloquies” from childhood to middle age.

Perhaps making rivulets, or stains, or puddles, would be more accurate a description of what goes on here. It is an intriguing technical exercise to subject stretches of Woolf’s opalescent prose and the tiniest of her characters’ internal reflections to the expository apparatus of video camera, sound effects, lamps and microphones that are all arrayed on a long table, as in a recording studio or tribunal hearing.

There is a distinctly hushed and revere...

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Latest User Review

Nick - 4 September 2008:

Fascinating. When the house lights came up it was like waking from a dream. I knew nothing about the novel but picked it up pretty well....

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