When first staged in 2015, ‘Woolf Works’ – Wayne McGregor’s ambitious three-act ballet inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf – was a landmark performance for the choreographer and the Royal Opera House. The austere triptych, inspired by ‘Mrs Dalloway’, ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Waves’, is still striking and emotive, but I was left wanting more.
I know, I know, I’m writing about a famously minimalist choreographer, who created a ballet inspired by an existential, modernist writer, with a contemporary electronic score (by Max Richter), and I’m asking for more. It’s supposed to be minimal and by all means, ‘Woolf Works’ meets the brief. Objectively, this is a good ballet. The second-to-none Royal Ballet cast can’t be faulted. And when ballet so famously often fails to embrace the future, ‘Woolf Works’ is refreshingly modern. My issue was that it lacked tension – I wanted the beautiful and sombre moments to be contrasted with dance that was more ugly, more grotesque, more suprising.
‘I now, I then’ (inspired by ‘Mrs Dalloway’), is the first of the three acts. Alessandra Ferri, playing the dual part of older Clarissa Dalloway (the well-to-do hostess who is planning a party) and Virginia Woolf, appears like a ghostly apparition obscured by a projection of Woolf’s scribblings. Behind her, three ever-revolving driftwood oblongs are the only setpiece. Ferri appears calm, almost dead behind the eyes – she will continue looking grave throughout the performance. Nearing 60, Ferri was perfectly cast as the increasingly weary and ever-serious Woolf. Returning to play the central role for the second time, her mature performance became the anchor for the sometimes frenetic performance.
McGregor deals with time in astonishing detail during the first act. An older Clarissa interacts with her younger self; young Clarissa performs a wiggly duet with her old flame Sally (played by Francesca Hayward), signifying the buoyancy of youthful love; older Clarrissa kisses a young Sally on the lips. But these blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments are tricky to follow if you’re not well versed in the intricacies of Woolf’s sometimes difficult work. And the layers of present merging with the past could have been built up with a more intricate, orchestral score. Instead, Richter’s electronic tune felt one-note.
It was frenetic, breathless and hypnotic.
‘Becomings’, the ‘Orlando’-inspired second act, brought a frantic shift in gear. Richter’s romantic score turns into a melodic electro, with hints towards industrial techno. The dance goes full-pelt from start to finish, leaving little room for the audience to breath. It was frenetic, breathless and hypnotic. No one dancer plays the part of the gender-shifting protagonist Orlando, instead the ensemble, led by assertive performances from Fumi Kaneko, Joseph Sissens and Francesca Hayward, dressed in gender-flipped golden Elizabethan dress, takes on the amorphous role.
In the final act, a voiceover from Gillian Anderson reads Woolf’s suicide note and love letter to her husband. The dance is backdropped with a black-and-white projection of a choppy sea. The sounds of waves gently crash underneath the monologue. It was striking, if not a little on the nose, but members of the audience were visibly moved by this. Performed on flats, ‘Tuesday’ was grounded and often mesmerising, if sometimes a little busy.
I loved this ballet when the pace slowed down. In ‘I now, I then’, a duet between two men is tender and moving. Septimus (Calvin Richardson) and his wartime officer and friend, Evans (Jospeh Sissens) perform counterbalances that move into tight embraces: the two men seem as if their existence depends on each other. During the finale, William Bracewell drags an increasingly exhausted Ferri around the stage in a moving pas de deux.
Throughout the stark show, the ingenious lighting (designed by Lucy Carter) pulls off some clever and beautiful tricks. In ‘In now, I then’, a yellow hue recreates golden hour during a delicate final group sequence. Cut to, ‘Becomings’, when ‘Star Wars’-esque laser beams fill the Royal Opera House auditorium. At one moment the beams reflect off the tulle of a black skirt, causing a rainbow luminescence. The explosive colour of the beams fades into an almost entirely grayscale palette for the closing act.
Although not perfect, ‘Woolf Works’ will leave you hungry to learn more about the author it’s named after. A purposefully mysterious and fragmented work, McGregor has managed to capture that melancholy and unsettling feeling that reading Woolf can leave you with. I must applaud the ambition, as distilling writing that is disjointed, discombobulated and sometimes nonsensical into a semi-narrative ballet was never going to be an easy feat. While the semi-plot was hard to follow, the best thing to do was to sit back and let it wash over you like the waves. I left ‘Woolf Works’ feeling down and sedate. However, considering the source material, I’m not surprised if that’s what McGregor wanted.