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Experimental jellyfish. After reading Dickens I wanted to be Dickens, just as after reading D. H. Lawrence I wanted to be Lawrence. I can’t imagine wanting to be Virginia Woolf, however, after the total immersion of Waves, the National Theatre’s brilliant adaptation of her experimental 1931 novel, The Waves. Like Lawrence, Woolf wanted to unseat “the old stable ego” (as Lawrence called it in a famous letter) in order to reach deeper, more realistic psychological dynamism. But what Lawrence had in mind was a liberated ego, frank in its sexual desires and evolved in its awareness. Woolf valued instability for its own sake, ego quivering on the verge of evaporating. In Waves we meet six characters, but they operate as one conscious organism, like a trepidacious jellyfish with liquid boundaries and a desire to float above the mud.
Director Katie Mitchell impressed me with her multi-media drama, ...some trace of her, earlier this season, but Waves ranks higher. She has captured Woolf’s essence in a way close to genius. The Waves attempted to push prose beyond normal limits, to capture color, sound, music, meaning, and “the shock of sensation” all at once, the way the world bombards us from all sides in real life. In her first diary entry about this ambitious experiment, Woolf declared that the new book must be “free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.” Where words fall short of this ideal, Mitchell uses multimedia to give us the uncanny experience of senses merging and then pushing beyond what words can say.
Mitchell’s method is the same as in ...some trace of her: the actors act and recite passages of prose, while at the same time they function as stage hands (moving props, making sound effects, setting up locales), all of which gets distilled into a film projected on a huge screen behind them—a beautiful film, one should add. At first the effect is distracting to the point of annoyance. There is so much scurrying about and shadowy stage business that you hardly know where to look. Stream of consciousness meanders like a river without banks. You can’t tell who owns any particular thought. Which one is Neville, Louis, or Bernard? Is Rhoda the autistic one who keeps bleeding into her surroundings, or has she merged into Jinny or Susan? Welcome to the jellyfish tank.
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| Paul Ready, Liz Kettle, Sean Jackson, Kate Duchêne, Anastasia Hille in Waves, photo Stephen Cummiskey |
But after a period of adjustment the visual poetry on the big screen (ocean, flowers, blank pale faces, whiteness standing in for the void) begins to link up with the spoken passages; the enacted scenes blossom with emotion, and the stage business acquires a life of its own, like the physical body doing what it does while the mind thinks. I don’t mean to spin folderol. Woolf’s imagery carries much of the evening, and Mitchell has pieced together some of the novel’s most intense episodes. The six main characters share a single life that comes together only to part again over many years, from childhood to late middle age. There is no plot as such, only fleeting moments of communion. Mitchell is canny enough to know that there has to be some kind of story, so she focuses on a dinner party where a seventh character, Percival, is eagerly anticipated. He is the beau ideal of everybody, and a homosexual crush for Neville. Handsome and devoid of the suffering, suffocating self-consciousness that plagues the six friends – as it did Woolf herself -- Percival unites physical beauty and ease in the world. But he dies in a riding accident in India, and our six-sided organism quivers with misery.
Woolf was lucky to be taken up by feminists, because otherwise her hypersensitivity can easily devolve into inert solipsism, not to mention elitism. Rhoda has a major crisis about stepping over a puddle, and the mixed voices all worry about the “vast abysses of space” while writing notes to the maid. In Henry James’s famous short story, the beast jumps out of the jungle to destroy the protagonist in the end; in Woolf, the beast jumps a dozen times a day, when somebody sneezes or leaves a draft. Mitchell is canny about this pitfall, too. She concentrates on the strongest emotional tug in the book – the tug of death. Rhoda will eventually jump from a sea cliff to her death – Woolf of course killed herself by drowning -- but we get perturbations of doom throughout. The waves of the title are the symbol of extinction; they sound variously like the stamp of a great beast, a wall collapsing on itself, or the roiling abyss. As a hint of Mitchell’s adroitness, we see movie images of waves, hear snippets of Debussy’s La Mer, view the actors’ faces immersed in water and rain – Woolf’s ideal of a pan-sensual poetry is thrillingly evoked.
As I said at first, one doesn’t emerge wanting to be Virginia Woolf, as exquisitely as she expresses the pain and ecstasy of self-awareness. Modern life took a sharp twist against her when melancholia was seen, not in the light of Hamlet but on the couch of Freud. Today, she would be diagnosed as chronically depressed and “helped” with Xanax. I put “helped” in italics because depression was Woolf’s medium as well as her affliction. It shaped mind and music in her. Before seeing Waves, I tended to feel an aversion to such hopeless hypersensitivity, but now I realize that Woolf’s intelligence does transcend her malady. She speaks of trying to pierce the cotton wool of everyday life to touch the reality that lies beyond it, and of language as a way to make experience whole and therefore redemptive. There’s an argument to be made for both, and Katie Mitchell makes it beautifully.
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