Director Katie Mitchell on her adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves
There is a little girl in a pink dress lying beside ferns with a bowl of white rose petals. She is pretending that they are boats on a rough sea. There is an Australian boy with a buckle shaped like a snake. He hides in a hedge from his friends who are chasing butterflies on a gravel path. He dreams about the Nile and a strange chained beast stamping on the beach. There is a girl who cannot do her maths and has to sit in the schoolroom after the class has ended. She is thin and her shoulder blades stick through her dress so that they look like wings folded across her back. Then there are a boy and a girl who take a trip to a large white house where they see a lady writing and are chased off the property by angry gardeners with gigantic brooms. All these children are at a boarding nursery school by the sea. This is the world into which the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's strange, entrancing and fragmentary seventh novel, The Waves, plunges us.
Told in a series of interior monologues, or "stream-of-consciousness" narratives, the novel covers the lives of six friends - three men and three women - from early childhood until death. We start at this nursery school on the south coast and finish years later in a restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, when only one of them is still alive. Their lives are caught in a succession of snapshots.
Woolf wrote The Waves between July 1929 and late 1931. But its genesis can be traced back to 1927, when she recorded in her diary on February 21:
Why not invent a new kind of play - as for instance
Woman thinks: ...
He does.
Organ plays.
She writes.
They say:
She sings:
Night speaks:
I think it must be something in this line - though I cannot now see what. Away from facts: free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.
This quote is irresistible for a theatre director because it validates the attempt to make a live performance from a novel. It also makes me sad that Woolf never wrote plays, because the diary extract reminds me of Lorca or Marguerite Duras, whose characters are often named "He" and "She". Woolf clearly had a fascination with the theatre, as suggested by the character of Miss La Trobe in her final novel, Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe tries to stage the whole history of civilisation in a village pageant.
Any attempt to dramatise a famous novel is perilous. Readers build pictures of characters, places and events in their heads while they read. Any alternative representation presents them with a different picture that can often disappoint. And Woolf's novel poses more obstacles than most when it comes to transposing it to the theatre. First, there is no external narrative; second, the text is comprised only of inner thoughts; and third, it covers an enormous sweep of time.
When the Company and I set out to adapt the book for the stage, our aim was to find a way of performing it that was true to Woolf's ambitions and yet provided the audience with footholds. We knew that a literal representation of the story would be inappropriate, like hanging lead shot on the feet of a bird and then expecting it to fly.
I recently studied the psychology of memory and how the past is stored in our brains. It is suggested that information is held in a series of flash cards with trigger images on them. You might, for example, have a card with a close-up of red berries on them. This is your flash card for a walk with a loved one. On the walk, the late afternoon winter sun hit some berries on a rowan tree and it is that image which subsequently lies at the heart of the memory. In the same way, Woolf captures key moments in flash images: the moon reflected through the apple tree as the news of a murdered man hits a little boy on the stairs, or the way in which the white washing billows around the servant, Florrie, as the butler, Ernest, kisses her. These images are crystallised and then repeated throughout the novel.
There is no guiding authorial voice in Woolf's book. Instead, the text is divided into what she called "dramatic monologues", in which the thoughts of each character are written. The reader jumps from the mind of one character into the next without any guiding links. The effect is like taking an ordinary novel and cutting all the text except for the thoughts. Descriptions of time, place and dialogue are all missing. On first reading, The Waves leaves you feeling a little adrift as you try to piece together the characters' objective existence entirely from their subjective perceptions. Indeed, the novel is striking in its historical omissions, in particular the first world war. Woolf's point is that the lasting and significant events in our lives are small and insignificant in the eyes of the outside world. You might become a shipping magnate, like Louis, one of the characters, but it is your first experience of being washed in a cold bath at boarding school that lodges with greater force in your memory.
I first read the novel at university, where I did a special paper on Woolf. My copy of the book from that time has several black biro marks next to different passages. Their meaning is opaque to me now. I remember being struck by the abstract form, but my paper focused on two other novels, The Years and To the Lighthouse. I revisited The Waves recently as part of my research for Nesta. I was looking for a non-theatre text with which to explore the relationship between theatre and dance. We needed strong images, characters and narrative. I don't know why, but The Waves came to mind. To my surprise, many images from the book remained imprinted in my memory: the fin cutting through the surface of a calm sea; Susan's dream of burying an entire school; a telephone ringing in an empty room.
As I worked on the material with dancers and actors, the themes began to fascinate me - identity, friendship, time and death. Then I became aware of the tension between the ordinariness of the characters' lives and the extraordinariness of their thoughts. If it were possible to make it into a live performance, it might make us think about each other differently.
My work with dance led me in an entirely different direction - towards the use of social dance in classical drama - but my curiosity about staging The Waves remained. A workshop at the National Theatre Studio with actors led to a new starting point and the show was scheduled.
The first thing we pinned down was the timescale. There is only one explicit reference in the novel - to a photograph of Queen Alexandra on the wall of a girls' school. The factual vagueness elsewhere meant that we could make our own choices. We decided to tie the dates of the action to Woolf's own biography. Our production starts with the children, aged seven, at nursery school in 1893 and finishes in 1933, when they are all 51.
Next we cut the text down from 228 pages to 40, to make a working script from which we could devise staging solutions. We cut the final chapter altogether. This leisurely recapping of events by the last surviving friend, now an old man, draws the novel to a glorious close, but would send a theatre audience gently to sleep.
Then we decided to explore sound and live video images. These new tools would enable us to jump effortlessly and speedily between different people, times, events and places. We approached them cautiously because video, in particular, can drain the colour out of live performances. The actors have been remarkable for their tenacity and imagination, moving dexterously between text, live sound effects, video operation, film acting and stage performances.
The work has been slow and difficult - at times agonising, as we have tried to forge a performance language that captures the spirit of Woolf's poetic material. It is impossible to predict accurately what the outcome will be but, crammed full of images, sound, light and poetry, it is already a joyful leap into the world of The Waves.
· Waves is in rep at the National Theatre, London SE1, from Thursday until January 13. Box office: 020-7452 3000.