WAVES. To 8 February.
London
WAVES
Devised by Katie Mitchell and the company from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Cottesloe Theatre In rep to 8 February 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30p, Mat 13, 20, 24, 3, 7 Feb 2.30pm
Audio-described 19, 20 Jan 2.30pm
Captioned 5 Feb
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7452 3000
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 January
Imaginative, innovative approach unlocks a novel’s tough terrain.
In the mid-80s Alan Ayckbourn wrote 2 plays, Woman in Mind and Invisible Friends, in which a character creates an imaginary family. At first they are idealised alternatives to actual relatives but they become increasingly menacing, tanking over the individual who imagines them. A playscript, were it sensate, might feel similarly towards director Katie Mitchell.
At first, she created vividly physical, imaginative productions. Yet increasingly, her productions have seemed to envelop a play in needless theatricality, which stifles and deforms as much as it creates.
Now she’s taken the obvious step, getting rid of the troublesome script-factor altogether. Instead she and her fine acting company at the Cottesloe have devised a theatre-piece “from the text of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves” (what else about the novel would it be created from if not the text?).
Paradoxically, while it is very much a theatre-piece it’s staged using the techniques of radio and TV. Microphones and close-up video demand a quiet intimacy, yet also a division between word and image, or aspects of an image, which makes the impact theatrical almost despite itself. And Woolf’s novel gains emotional immediacy through the visible artifice.
Almost everything’s created live, the actors creating images which are projected behind them, as sections of Woolf’s novel are read out, both authorial comment and dialogue – Kristin Hutchinson matches the prose with a wonderful replica of self-possessed upper middle-class, inter-war speech style.
Technically, the production’s a fine demonstration of the ways artistic effects can be created on-camera; these include a face refracted through swirling water, figures appearing and fading through a mirror - and, at a centre-piece dinner party, a wide dissociation between what performers do and what the audience sees.
None of this is capricious; it accommodates perfectly the novel’s indirections and building of characters in depth through implication. The overall shape of events, if not every detail, becomes clear, and the mood, which grows increasingly sombre as youthful hope turns to middle-age experience, deepens richly. This innovative, perceptive and highly-rewarding theatre brilliantly gives a sense of intimacy with a novel that can seem opaque on the page.
Cast: Kate Duchene, Michael Gould, Anastasia Hille, Kristin Hutchinson, Sean Jackson, Liz Kettle, Paul Ready, Jonah Russell
Director: Katie Mitchell
Designer: Vicki Mortimer
Lighting: Paule Constable
Sound: OGareth Fry
Music: Paul Clark
Music Director/Arranger: Simon Allen
Video: Leo Warner for Fifty Nine Ltd
Company voice work: Kate Godfrey
Tap-dance coach: Donna Berlin
2007-01-04 00:45:40