FringeReview UK 2026
The Waves
Jermyn Street Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, classical, Costume, Drama, Feminist Theatre, LGBTQ+, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
How might you net Virginia Woolf’s identity-fluid six-pack of characters she called a “play-poem”? And in an intimate space? Flora Wilson Brown’s adaptation of Woolf’s 1931 masterpiece The Waves premieres at Jermyn Street Theatre directed by Júlia Levai till May 23.
A mostly outstanding – and theatrical – adaptation of an almost impossible-to-adapt novel.
Review
How might you net Virginia Woolf’s identity-fluid six-pack of characters she called a “play-poem”? And in an intimate space? Flora Wilson Brown’s adaptation of Woolf’s 1931 masterpiece The Waves premieres at Jermyn Street Theatre directed by Júlia Levai till May 23.
Gone are the resources Katie Mitchell crafted at the National in 2006, with film, video, foley effects. Tomás Palmer’s set silvered by foil and with just a few if surprising reveals, is a tabula rasa on which characters occasionally score childhood graffiti; though not for long. It’s Anett Black’s unfussy costumes that signpost, including uniform white t-shirts like school labels with those six names, until peeled later on with adulthood. No gradations of the sunrise, high noon and sunset of the novel either: it’s simply lit by Lucia Sánchez Roldán. Matthew Tuckey’s sound design and music are liminal: a crash of waves is faintly audible. There’s a hubbub as if sieved through a monastery fifty miles away. Ken Nakajima’s movement direction is the most active ingredient.
Six characters meeting in early childhood stay bonded for life, and coalesce round a more solid identity, one Percival, who never speaks directly. His life and death mark a certainty absent to the others: they feel it. Above all we have to rely on storytelling: the province of one of the two main protagonists, Bernard.
The evanescent and lyrical aren’t great markers of hope in a fragile world. But just as with Woolf’s character Jinny, they run through Wilson Brown’s work without fear. Her The Beautiful Future is Coming, with its three simultaneous timelines was the finest play to emerge from Jermyn Street’s January-February 2024 festival. That liminal strip of affirmation – here pierced by Woolf’s writing – seems ideally suited to Wilson Brown’s adaptation too. It’s an absorbing, indeed immersive 90 minutes, where the silver speaks of luminosity and transience.
Nine scenes, six characters define themselves clearly. They rise like a filament of light and fade, a kind of collective identity, except when grouped round this seventh: the solid Percival, bastion of certainty, empire and obliviousness. “But here and now we are together” they intone when anything Percival is inspired, by a dinner party when everyone’s 25 or later (a large board is detached, covered with cloth and silver in a rare naturalistic moment). That’s after the verbally image-rich opening sections of childhood play and discovery, the pain of school and gender separation, the exuberance of university for just two, and into adulthood. Wilson Brown doesn’t dwell on Woolf’s arresting images, but there’s enough of them. After those t-shirts, it’s easy to identify who’s speaking, and to an extent the wisp of nuance that separates each.
There’s almost existentialist, displaced Rhoda. Ria Zmitrowicz (The Welkin (NT), The Glow (Royal Court), The Doctor, Three Sisters Almeida) here more solidly embodies a core narrator. Zmitrowicz acts more youthfully than some etiolated projections of Woolf that Rhoda can conjure. She also playfully realises imperialist Percival (and at one comedic moment Archie Backhouse takes on Rhoda when they converse). Levai and Wilson Brown can only sketch this implicit critique of imperialism, about to break its head as it takes a fall. Woolf herself only explains the others’ fascination by contrasting Percival’s solidity with six onstage who never quite feel they exist: it’s a challenge.
Bernard (Tom Varey, Hamnet, and only just out of Park’s Miss Julie) here edges a northern twang (not at all Bloomsbury) lending him a warmth and occasionally innocence. It’s as if he, like Louis, is an outsider of sorts: always jotting ideas for a narrative he never seems to realise.
Susan, the most grounded (a wry and winning performance from Breffni Holahan, Three Sisters Gaiety) emerges from and recedes into the farm she was brought up in. Susan has a secret pain when Jinny (an exuberant, gleeful Syakira Moeladi, As You Like It, Soho Place, Dear Octopus) kisses Louis. Unlike Rhoda and Jinny Susan doesn’t pass into society’s drawing-rooms, but realises the solidity and weight of animals, children, bags of flour. Neville (a watchful Pedro Leandro, Julius Caesar RSC, Fiji) no longer the don of the original finds fame as a playwright: and is most in love with Percival. Moeladi lends Jenny a fierce joy, a fearless snatching at fabrics, colour, love and sexuality, the time to drop red lipstick (probably never), and her continual affirmation: “I am not afraid.”
And there’s banker’s son Louis (Archie Backhouse), cleverest of scholars who could have asked a schoolmaster’s help to apply to Oxbridge and swerve his fate. Here it’s a defining moment, where he and Rhoda know he pursues a perfect life in ledgers and finance: and hates it. Backhouse allows Louis the weight and pain that makes him, rather than Bernard, perhaps the lead outsider. Here too Rhoda’s and Louis’ lives are knit together. As Leandro, Neville shudders with what might seem life-defining pain; though everyone’s loss recedes: Neville’s into young men and professional fulfilment. “And now we have chosen, or the choice has been made for us” as Rhoda’s words get taken up as a refrain.
It’s this shaping – when checked against the original – that alerts you to how much Wilson Brown tweaks the sheer feel of The Waves as six actors pass and interject; though there’s monologues from them all. Early on they tangle words in a childlike polyphony. The Waves’ refractive, sometimes glaucous telling is reinvented (Neville’s plays are studied at university by Susan’s son). It’s chronologically faithful: Rhoda and Bernard still go in separate pilgrimages to the sun. Though it ends on an odd note from Louis. And Wilson Brown playfully highlights such Woolf ironies as “a king fell over a molehill? Just over there, and died”: as Bernard echoes the fact that Percival’s horse tripped over one in India.
There are losses. Woolf, arch modernist yet wove fervid swoops of Swinburnian verse into her prose. Wilson Brown avoids it. We’re deprived of exhortations and repetitions, the kind that lands the last words “O death” in the novel. It sounds like an invocation, a prayer, a longing. “How incredible it is to be alive” doesn’t replace that. The novel’s wildest exaltations haven’t quite landed here. The resolution is gentler. But Wilson Brown and Levai now realise The Waves as it should be: intimate theatre. There’s no bells and whistles for death as it crashes, very faintly. It’s a mostly outstanding – and theatrical – adaptation of an almost impossible-to-adapt novel.
Casting Director Jatinder Chera, Intimacy Director Haruka Kuroda, Assistant Director Charlotte Rogers, Accent Coach Mary Howland, Wellbeing Practitioner Noelle Adames (TAWC), Production Manager Laurel Marks, Stage Manager Phoebe Buckland, ASM Ciara Pidgeon.
