Hi-tech, time-bending fantasy … Eric Underwood and Sarah Lamb in Part 2: Becomings from Woolf Works by the Royal Ballet. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Royal Ballet: Woolf Works five-star review – exhilarating and ravishingly expressive

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Royal Opera House, London
Wayne McGregor’s triptych based on Virginia Woolf’s life and writings is a haunting meditation on memory, madness and time

Wayne McGregor doesn’t flinch from exposing the riskiness of his latest project – a full-length ballet inspired by the life and writings of Virginia Woolf.

Dancing with Mrs Dalloway: Woolf Works by Wayne McGregor – in pictures

There’s no dance in the work’s opening moments, simply the sound of Woolf’s own voice, talking about the English language. Listening to her clipped autocratic vowels, her meticulous handling of words, she seems to hark from a world entirely alien to McGregor’s super-modern sensibility and to the essentially wordless art of dance.

McGregor not only finds a convincing connection with Woolf but with the support of his superb collaborators and cast (including a lavishly atmospheric score from Max Richter, astounding lighting design from Lucy Carter, and a piercingly affecting central performance from 52-year-old ballerina Alessandra Ferri) he seems to be choreographing in a richer, freer space than I’ve seen from him before.

Woolf Works makes no attempt to be a consistent “story ballet”. Each of its acts takes off from a separate novel – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – and each riffs on the style of Woolf’s writing in very different ways. The first is the most narrative–based. McGregor frames his choreography within three giant rotating wooden squares, which evoke the novel’s shifts between present and past. Clarissa Dalloway, perfectly portrayed by Ferri as an uncertain middle-aged woman, dances in the protective embrace of her husband while gazing at her younger self, dancing giddily with the girl who was once the impossible love of her life. In a parallel world, shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith is partnered by his equally protective spouse, while reaching back to memories of his adored soldier buddy Evans.

Beatriz Stix Brunell and Alessandra Ferri in Part 1: I Now, I Then from Woolf Works. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Even without prior knowledge of the novel, this act stands alone as a ravishingly expressive work, with McGregor’s choreography ranging from a delicate, detailed intimacy, to the raw ragged duet in which Septimus and Clarissa dance towards the edge of madness.

By contrast the Orlando act is a blast of hi-tech, time-bending fantasy. Laser beams dissect the stage as 12 men and women in an androgynous assortment of ruffs, doublets and tutus embody the rush and vividness of the novel’s style. McGregor’s choreography here reverts to its more familiar hyperkinetic bendy extremes yet still Woolf is everywhere. Natalia Osipova and Steven McRae dance the first of Orlando’s time-travelling love affairs with witty, courtly swagger. Other pairings come nuanced with lyrical tenderness, or lingering eroticism; and in the spaces between the choreographic dazzle we see different Orlandos, wandering slightly dazedly between time zones.

The Waves act is both simpler and more daring. It opens with a recording of Woolf’s suicide letter, so agonisingly sad you doubt any choreography could follow it. Yet Ferri’s huge dark eyes and her exquisitely reticent body become the stage’s centre of gravity as McGregor pours wave upon wave of dancers into a mass, unfolding ensemble that links the novel’s childhood-to-grave chronology with the idea of Woolf’s life flashing past as she drowns.

Gary Avis, Steven McRae and Paul Kay in Part 2: Becomings from Woolf Works. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Woolf Works is not a perfect ballet – it suffers from momentary lapses of focus, and odd awkwardness. But in the depth and the scope of its ambitions, and in its haunting meditations on memory, madness and time, it takes both McGregor – and the concept of the three-act ballet – to a brave and entirely exhilarating new place.