IN A letter written soon after the completion of The Waves, Virginia Woolf confessed that her husband, Leonard, suspected that few readers would “survive the first 100 pages”. Katie Mitchell’s theatrical response to the book is an intellectual and aesthetic pleasure — albeit a demanding one.

A freeflowing meditation on inner life and the nature of identity, Woolf’s work follows six friends from childhood to middle age and towards death, and takes the form of a succession of subjective internal monologues. There is no dialogue and, though certain events emerge, no plot. Mitchell’s exquisitely skilled, highly imaginative production is multilayered, setting the acutely personal against worldly indifference.

Tables, lamps, cameras and a video screen are arranged in an anonymous space; eight actors in black move busily among them. One becomes Woolf, smoking meditatively. As her novel’s six speakers — Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda — begin their rush of sensations and memories, the words are spoken into microphones, creating an intense intimacy. Sound effects — running feet, splashing water, the hiss of a steam train — are supplied by other performers, actions by others still, the latter simultaneously filmed and shown on the screen, often from a startling angle. Dye is dripped into a bowl, and flowers of blood bloom in water; a breakfast- table scene shot from above becomes a ballet of butter knives, napkins and busy hands; an actress plunges her face into a tank of water, hair streaming, and we glimpse an eerie premonition not only of the death of the unhappy Rhoda, but of Woolf’s suicide by drowning.

The nakedness of the method by which these illusions are created prompts questions about the nature of reality, and the technical mundanity, set against the beautiful imagery, succinctly expresses the banal backdrop to an individual’s secret thoughts. Rhythmic movement that breaks into a brutally precise tap dance reflects the implacable march of time. And from the poetic stream, characters form: the delicate, haunted Rhoda; the nature-loving, strong-minded Susan; the glamorous, flirtatious Jinny; the dreamy, dopey Bernard; the vigorous, snobbish Louis, so ashamed of his Australian accent; and the pent-up homosexual Neville, who spends his entire life obsessed by unrequited love.

True, it’s not easy, and Mitchell requires you to work at it. But in return she gives you art of an exceptional order.

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