Review: THE WAVES, Jermyn Street Theatre

Virginia Woolf isn’t the easiest author to adapt for the stage, and her lesser-known 1931 experimental novel The Waves presents a particularly interesting dramaturgical challenge. Six friends meet at school, and undergo the typical trials of a bildungsroman, all within an ambitious stream of multiple consciousnesses, where characters hop in and out of each other’s minds.

Flora Wilson Brown is an ideal choice to write the stage adaptation – her previous play, climate crisis saga The Beautiful Future is Coming, featured similar interlocking narratives, where several characters blended into one. Here, she initially dresses her six actors in T-shirts bearing their character names, a sign that these are not so much characters as ciphers for different aspects of the human condition.

Frequently, the dialogue, taking our cast through school, university and young adult ennui, will switch characters mid-line; characters often speak over one another, or pick up where each other left off. Júlia Levai’s directing style fittingly favours character over plot, the actors facing the wall when they’re not needed for a scene, giving this the feel of a particularly sophisticated open mic.

At the heart of Woolf’s novel is the unseen character Percival, whom the male characters meet at boarding school and who becomes a central, steadying pillar in all of their lives. In this play, Percival is an omnipresent ghost, sometimes flowing into the characters’ dialogue, other times spoken of in a hushed third person. It all culminates in a delicately rendered dinner party set piece before Percival leaves for India, where the characters experience “a perfect, happy moment made of us” right before unthinkable tragedy.

There are occasional stumbling blocks, particularly when it comes to balancing the need for momentum in the plot with the lyrical monologues that showcase the best of Woolf’s writing. Some of the characterisations – the Lytton Strachey-inspired writer Neville (Pedro Leandro) and the socialite Jinny (Syakira Moeladi) especially – fall into stereotype, and sometimes Wilson Brown seems in a rush to get out some clunky exposition about the characters’ lives before she can start delving into their psyches again.

At its best, though, this is a life-affirming, poetic portrait of all the ways grief can manifest, and of how we keep on living anyway. Ria Zmitrowicz as Woolf stand-in Rhoda is a particular standout, conjuring the character’s pathological need to form her life into a tidy story, which comes out both as nostalgia and as a compulsion, shaped by an almost robotic vocal delivery.

Tomás Palmer’s set resists period cliche, and instead places this quasi-Bloomsbury Group in what seems like the inside of a rocket ship. The silver walls take the audience outside of time, and can morph into a techno club just as easily as an austere boarding school classroom. The walls also function as a kind of chalkboard, where characters etch out visions for their lives or snatches of conversation, always in an attempt to gain some control over their own stories.

This is really what The Waves is about – how we remember what has happened to us, and how much of that memory was formed by others, outside our control. Crucial to this is capturing the ambiguity of Woolf’s writing on stage, and Wilson Brown has done that admirably.

The Waves plays at Jermyn Street Theatre until 23 May