Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works: An Electric Sensation at the Royal Ballet

Who would have thought a three-act response to Virginia Woolf’s novels would strike such a chord with audiences? But Wayne McGregor’s 2015 work has become part of the furniture at the Royal Ballet – it’s a wonderfully designed handclasp between form and feeling. McGregor’s best works chase brainbox ideas alongside electric sensation – and even more than Dante and Margaret Atwood, Woolf helps him do this, with an added heartsick richness. Neither artist is driven by story so much as by finding a form to explore thought and emotion. Is living in memory a blessing or curse? In the first act, for Natalia Osipova’s Mrs Dalloway, it’s a chance to consider the road not taken: casual kisses with blonde Sally (Leticia Dias) that might have mattered more; yoking herself to William Bracewell’s chaotic dreamer. Osipova’s melancholy spaniel eyes gaze protectively at her livewire younger self (Sae Maeda, excellent) – then she steps into the memories, triangulating past and present. Memory is torture to Septimus, shell-shocked survivor of the war. Marcelino Sambé makes him feel untethered – staring at hands he doesn’t recognise, curling his body as if he can’t trust his bones to hold him up. Osipova is drawn into the orbit of his anguish: each of them fragile as Max Richter’s stirring score brings in intrusive chimes and chatter, the world pressing in on them. Osipova, leading the opening night cast, brings her trademark intensity, but also a softness. When Woolf Works premiered in 2015, she led the glinting central act – this has become a ballet in which dancers can grow up, moving from young pup to midlife crisis. The second act is a choose-your-own-adventure sequence inspired by the shape-shifting story of Orlando. Gold foil Elizabethan costumes by Moritz Junge and choreography driven by off-kilter sass are both eye-popping, if over-extended. Dancers hurl themselves into McGregor’s kaleidoscopic moves: a lairy strut, a competitive dazzle, a liquid solo. With Richter’s unworldly electronica and Lucy Carter’s laser quest lighting, it channels Orlando’s journey as a state of perpetual revolution – if you keep moving, you can be whoever you want. The Waves lies behind the final act, backed by Ravi Deepres’ charcoal-toned film of slow-rolling waters. Osipova’s character has relinquished the struggle to keep going. As children and adults fill the stage, she’s an auntie left out of the youngsters’ games, a hollow-eyed figure lost in the throng. Yet the emotional core of this act is Bracewell’s tender husband: darting around Osipova, trying to keep her from slipping through his fingers. He connects us back to Gillian Anderson’s earlier voiceover, reading Woolf’s suicide note. “If anybody could have saved me,” she wrote to her husband Leonard, “it would have been you.” It’s an achingly sombre conclusion.