Posted on
2026-01-28
Ten years on, this ambitious ballet remains one of the most compelling translations of literature into dance.
Woolf Works at the Royal Opera House draws you into Virginia Woolf’s world of luminous volatility, and drops you back quietly transformed.
Endlessly compelling for both her radical imagination and her troubled life, Woolf is a fitting muse for Wayne McGregor, another restless experimenter. His first full length ballet, which was first seen here in 2015, has returned like a glamorous, melancholic apparition. In the Words of Max Richter, “Wayne’s language and way of connecting to music has a unique grammar… it’s always very striking.”
Woolf’s brilliance lies in her ability to describe the varied, multidimensional lives we lead. The opening section, I Now, I Then, drawing on Mrs Dalloway, explores memory, trauma and inner life. Huge moving frames slide across the stage, becoming portals between different versions of the self. Dancers pass through them like travellers crossing time zones. Natalia Osipova’s Woolf/Dalloway is restrained and fragile, shadowed by unease. Marcelino Sambé’s Septimus shatters, he’s twitchy and hollowed out, weighted by invisible wounds.
Then Becomings arrives and detonates the atmosphere. Inspired by Orlando, this is McGregor at his most untethered. Beams of turquoise light cut through the space, occasionally fractured by red, turning the stage into something between a sci-fi landscape and a lucid dream. Time loosens. Gender blurs. Storytelling politely steps aside. The movement is ferocious: extreme extensions, sudden sprints, bodies bending past expectation. The final section, Tuesday, brings everything inward. Here, the stage is dominated by a vast black-and-white film of the sea, endlessly rolling, impassive and immense. Silvers and blues wash over the dancers. The pace slows. The noise falls away.
Max Richter’s score runs through the evening like an emotional pulse: part symphony, part electronic landscape. Under Koen Kessels’s precise conducting, it binds the work’s beauty, restlessness, sorrow, and longing into a single current. As Richter has said, Woolf’s language is “a search tool, a way of probing what it means to be a person.” Visually, the production is meticulously composed. The sets by Ciguë and We Not I are spare but resonant. Lucy Carter’s lighting shapes feeling as much as space. Ravi Deepres’s films feel like projections of Woolf’s subconscious.
Rarely does a ballet think and feel with such force all at once, and rarer still, is one that stays with you in such a way.
Words – Celeste Aurora Mae
www.rbo.org.uk
