Time holds the key to Wayne McGregor’s masterful ballet, drawn from the life and work of Virginia Woolf. The past, softly layered with memories. The present, crowded with possibilities. The future, stretching out hopelessly.
Woolf Works was made in 2015 for the Italian ballerina Alessandra Ferri as her career began its extraordinary second wind – and now, at nearly 60, she resumes the central role (alternating with Natalia Osipova and Marianela Nuñez).
Surrounded by youths, she’s a feeling repository of lived experience, of gravity and grace. She anchors a ballet that suggests how it feels to sift through memory, to pace the confines of your own restless mind.
The first act draws on Mrs Dalloway: Ferri’s dark eyes pool in reverie as Virginia shades into Clarissa, the society hostess who is shadowed by Septimus, a shellshocked survivor of the trenches. Amid three vast revolving frames, thresholds to the past, the young Clarissa appears with her lost loves, male and female.
As they dart and caper to Max Richter’s keeningly romantic score, Ferri too channels her blithe young self, moving in perpetual motion. They fling themselves forward, confident they’ll be caught – and Ferri too makes to fly off the front of the stage.
Septimus (Calvin Richardson) has had the confidence pummelled out of him. His tormented body twists in on itself, giving way even as his mind falters. His arms beat like wings that won’t carry him anywhere, and he mirrors Woolf’s own terror of mental illness – now when Ferri reaches beyond the stage, it’s a gesture of annihilation. Even when happier memories return, she’s always raising her hand, preparing her goodbye.
Orlando inspires the busy second act, its golden Elizabethan costumes glaring in laser quest lighting. Like Emma Corrin’s recent West End version, its cross-gendered, time-travelling antics explore new ways for bodies to play together.
The plot’s four centuries compress into half an hour. It’s a bit everything everywhere all at once, but the cast relish McGregor’s signature extremity: Fumi Kaneko is gorgeously poised; Francesca Hayward goes full tilt at her lunge, skip and wibble; lush moves ripple through Joseph Sissens like a rabbit through a greedy python. They flicker through the spotlights like moths enjoying a flourishing last hurrah.
The closing act, prompted by The Waves, is the heartbreaker. Against a greyscale film of slow but inexorable sea, Gillian Anderson’s voiceover reads Woolf’s suicide note – which is also a love letter to her husband Leonard.
William Bracewell partners Ferri in a beautiful act of care, supporting her for as long as he can. Ferri becomes lost in the dancers’ whirl. She holds out empty hands, achingly lonely among the busy throng of humanity. By the ballet’s end she seems buffeted, exhausted, with nowhere to go but to be engulfed.
