Nowhere to Hide — and Nowhere Else You’d Rather Be
There is a moment early in The Waves at Jermyn Street Theatre when you realise the actors have absolutely nowhere to retreat to. The space is so intimate, so stripped of artifice, that even the theatre’s single toilet opens directly off the stage. What follows is 95 uninterrupted minutes of ensemble theatre at its most exposed — and its most extraordinary, writes Katie Kelly.
This production takes Virginia Woolf’s 1931 stream-of-consciousness novel and distils it into pure, elemental theatre. Six friends — Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis — are traced from the sunlit chaos of primary school through to the heavy weather of middle age. There are no scene changes, no elaborate sets, no stars. The props budget has the feel of a cash-strapped state school production, and this turns out to be precisely right. With nothing to hide behind and nothing to dazzle with, the cast has only language and one another.
And what they do with both is breathtaking. This is ensemble work as a kind of choreography — a beautiful, intricate dance in which nobody misses a single step. The intimacy of the space demands, and receives, a form of acting that feels almost unnervingly natural. There is no need to project to the back of the stalls; these performers simply speak, and in doing so they conjure entire worlds. A new parent overwhelmed by love and exhaustion. A woman watching herself age in a mirror. A man shackled to an office desk, his interior life vastly larger than his circumstances will allow.
The language — spare, poetic, devastatingly economical — does the heavy lifting throughout. Sentences do the work of paragraphs. And nowhere is this more shattering than in the portrayal of Rhoda, a woman who moves through her life loved by those around her and entirely unable to feel it. Her isolation is not merely social but ontological — a disconnection from her very self. “I look in the looking glass that Jinny hates and I think — that face is my face. I recognise it — but I am not in here, really.” It is one of the most precise and quietly devastating articulations of depression I have encountered on a stage.
Loss, when it arrives, radiates outward through the group. Percival — never present, always felt — is the bright star around whom these six have orbited since childhood, to varying degrees and with varying intensity. His death is not dramatised but mourned, and the grief lands hard. Neville’s description of a life paralysed by that loss lingers long after the house lights rise: “The future is impossible and the past hurts too much to think about so I am just — stuck here, dragging my body around.” That line alone is worth the journey.
There is laughter here too — this is not ninety-five minutes of unrelieved grief — but the production never lets you settle into comfort for long. By the time it ends, you have lived something. On the night I attended, the tube strike imposed a long walk home through crisp night air. It turned out to be exactly what was needed: time and quiet in which to let the evening settle.
This is raw, unadorned, all-consuming FIVE STAR theatre. If you can get a ticket, go.
Jermyn Street Theatre, London SW1Y 6ST until 23rd May.
Booking and full details: https://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/the-waves/
