Lola Gabellini-Fava: A Question of Essence

Woolf Works, dir. Wayne McGregor. Royal Opera House, London. 17 January–13 February 2026.

For better or for worse, adaptation has shuffled its way to the front and centre of our stages and our screens. Although adaptation has been part of Virginia Woolf’s literary legacy since Colin Gregg’s 1983 BBC film To the Lighthouse, in recent years, the pace has decidedly quickened. Perhaps spurred in part by last year’s centenary of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s fiction is increasingly claiming its place on West End stages and beyond, from Michael Grandage’s 2022 Orlando to Jen Heyes’ immersive reimagining of Mrs Dalloway, set to tour the UK later this year.

Wayne McGregor may be said to have both anticipated and epitomised this trend with Woolf Works, a three-act, experimental ballet that was first performed at the Royal Opera House in 2015 and reprised on the same stage earlier this year. The ballet comprises three, thirty-to-forty-minute pieces centred around Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves respectively. For Woolf purists, of which I am perhaps confessedly one, herein lies the first irresolvable issue: is it possible – and should we even attempt – to condense three of the most notoriously complex and celebrated modernist novels into two-hours and forty-five minutes of evening entertainment? Not only does this compact triptych structure risk feeling reductive, it also falsely suggests a cohesive narrative thread between the novels that sits uneasily with the expansiveness of Woolf’s œuvre. This sanding down of textual nuance is however not limited to Woolf Works, but reflects a wider, growing contemporary impulse towards the repackaging of literature in forms more easily marketable and digestible.

While I’m not equating Woolf Works with the growing emergence of films tailored to our now ubiquitous attention economy, there is nevertheless something over-explicit about the ballet’s engagement with its sources. The first of the three pieces, I Now, I Then, introduces a younger Clarissa Dalloway character alongside an older version of the protagonist (also, somewhat confusingly, perhaps Woolf herself), whose floral dress represents the first of several heavy-handed references to the novels: ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’, Marianela Nuñez’s costume dutifully reminds us. These overt nods to the novels raise questions about audience. Though they may pass unnoticed to those unfamiliar with Woolf, for those who do recognise them, they function as a display of the piece’s literary awareness and an invitation for the audience to be in on it, revealing a first problem with the pursuit of fidelity in adaptation. Since there can be no consensus about whom or what we should be faithful to, the unambiguous references to Mrs Dalloway in I Now, I Then may seem scrupulously faithful to some but reductive or misjudged to others.

After a short interval, the second piece Becomings abruptly pulls us into the starkly contrasting world of McGregor’s self-proclaimed ‘alien aesthetic’, complete with lasers, reflective dance floors, rainbow-coloured neon lights, gold period costumes and flexatone warping sounds. The effect is overwhelming; it’s hard to know where to look or whom to follow here. Seemingly intent on emulating the experience of reading Woolf’s shapeshifting, time-travelling Orlando, Becomings proposes an altogether different relationship to its source than the first piece, replacing narrative nods with stylistic ones. The inconsistency between these two adaptative strategies exposes an underlying uncertainty which follows the entirety of Woolf Works. This hesitation points to a deeper uncertainty about where the identity of the texts resides and therefore becomes a question of essence, or what Walter Benjamin termed ‘aura’. If the goal is to preserve the identity of the original, then the first task would logically be to determine where that identity is located. Woolf Works never settles on an answer.

This persistent irresolution does, however, open another possible avenue into engagement with the source texts. If fidelity cannot be anchored securely in any concrete reference, then maybe the most faithful adaptation is paradoxically the unfaithful one, which strays further from its source. In Woolf Works, moments when the connection to the novels recedes gives McGregor’s choreography and Uzma Hameed’s dramaturgy the space to take on a life of their own. I Now, I Then begins with the recording of a resonant wind accompanied by the solemn chimes of Big Ben, as one lone dancer tentatively takes the stage. Movement and sound steadily accumulate: dancers join in, soft lighting intensifies to reveal a larger set, and Max Richter’s layered score gradually fills the auditorium. There’s a subtle, considered parallel here to the way that Mrs Dalloway builds on seemingly inconsequential moments and imbues them with resounding significance, as when Clarissa first hears the bells of Westminster:

There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.

The opening interjection ripples through the syntax of the entire paragraph, picking up speed and ‘tumbling’ through subordinate clauses before we can catch our breath. Though the building and quickening of movement in I Now, I Then speaks to this experience of reading Mrs Dalloway, it transforms into something of its own, an interlocutor rather than echo of its source.

This approach is further developed in the poignant pas de deux between the Clarissa and Septimus characters. The scene imagines an alternative Mrs Dalloway in which the two protagonists who famously never meet in the novel encounter one another, presenting a creative and resourceful solution to the tricky problem of exteriorising free indirect discourse into movement. Septimus – sensitively portrayed by Clavin Richardson – physically supports Clarrisa in lifts whilst restraining her at other points, enveloping Nuñez’s body as she attempts to break free. Reinforcing the reading of the two protagonists existing as one, McGregor’s choreography here inventively explores how inner turmoil might be represented on stage in a scene which demonstrates both a profound understanding of the original text and an interest in thinking beyond its original parameters.

Had the entirety of Woolf Works kept this creative distance from its source, I might have come away from the performance with a sense that Woolf had been granted some kind of poetic justice. Yet in edging closer and closer to its point of reference as it went on, the piece ends up ironically silencing the very thing it seeks to both celebrate and animate. The treatment of water, overwrought and overused in Becomings and in the final piece Tuesday, is case in point. Bright blue lasers shoot through the entire auditorium in the middle piece, as the matte black dancefloor of I Now, I Then is replaced by a reflective surface which covers the stage floor, creating the illusion of a shallow pool of water. Tuesday, meanwhile, takes place entirely against the backdrop of a black-and-white video of slowly crashing waves, mirrored in the rippling and diving movement of the dancers.

While there’s no denying that water is a central and persistent image in Woolf’s writing, McGregor’s ballet reduces the author’s complex, protean engagement with this element to a perfunctory nod to her prose. Through such devices, as per the Royal Opera House website, Woolf Works ‘evokes Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing style’. The parallels between these two modes of expression are indeed salient: both ballet as a form and Woolf’s writing seek to evoke several senses simultaneously, and, whilst outwardly presenting as spontaneous or unconstrained, both are the product of meticulous, precise planning which follow a set pace. ‘I say I am writing The Waves to a rhythm not a plot’, Woolf writes in September of 1930. Yet, w hile McGregor reminds us of the liquidity at its core, Woolf Works becomes so attached to the literal image of the ‘stream’ that it often forgets to engage with the very form of writing it describes.

Completing the trio of performances is the sobering and austere Tuesday, its title crudely borrowed from the heading of Woolf’s suicide note. The piece concludes with a perfectly synchronised corps de ballet accompanied by the crescendo of Richter’s orchestral score, a powerful ending that left me forgetting not only about the connection to The Waves but almost entirely of my own surroundings, even from some of the worst seats in the house. The piece’s first movement unfortunately undercuts this effect, opening– rather predictably, given the persistent romanticisation of Woolf’s death– with a recording of the author’s suicide note. Described by McGregor as ‘partly [Woolf’s] letters and biography colliding with this phenomenal story about growing older and letting go’, it’s difficult to see where The Waves fits into this final piece, beyond another reference to suicide-by-drowning. The decision to include this recording becomes even harder to defend when considering the content of the note itself and the broader context of Woolf’s letters, in which she consistently mourns the loss of clear expression: ‘You see I can’t even write this properly’. The words, distractingly voiced by actress Gillian Anderson , reverberated through a sobered, darkened auditorium.

My own affective, adverse reaction to Tuesday is an exemplary instance of how adaptation provokes protective instincts from devotees of their source texts. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has fallen victim – and then some – to such a response. ‘The trailer makes it seem as though [Fennell]’s totally dropped any of the meaning in the book. If she wanted to do a smutty period piece she could've done without bastardizing existing literature’, one Reddit user lambasts, whilst another keeps it short and snappy with the call to arms: ‘Women, let’s resist!!! Don’t bring your friends, don’t bring your men!’. Adaptation has always been hyper-scrutinised by viewers who consider it their duty to take up the cudgels of authors no longer here to defend themselves. Yet perhaps this reflex reveals less about any genuine moral obligation than about the nature of adaptation and the slipperiness of fidelity itself. There’s no blueprint for how Brontë’s Cathy or Woolf’s Septimus should look beyond what appears on the page, but even the most vivid descriptions in the text are never as fixed as a body on stage or screen. Since these forms therefore inevitably conflict with the highly individualised image each reader has already constructed, something is always bound to feel not quite right, a little too solid or a little too real in adaptations of literature.

Though in theory it’s easy to understand how infidelity is therefore as much a problem of the discrepancies between media as it is one of individual adaptation, in reality, associating any work of art with the title of a beloved work of fiction or the name of a famous author seems to automatically hold it to an unattainable standard: the exact standard of its source. The Royal Opera House avoids the term ‘adapted’. The digital programme describes each of the three pieces as ‘from’ the novels, keeping the relationship vague while suggesting a physical distance or departure from its source. Following suit, Studio Wayne McGregor defines Woolf Works as ‘inspired by the writing of Virginia Woolf’. Yet the indefinite and intangible qualities of these descriptions don’t seem to match up with the piece’s inclination towards literal, concrete stagings of plot points, style and biography, further demonstrating how it wavers in its affiliation to its sources.

This ambiguity speaks to a set of questions consistently negotiated across twentieth century criticism. From T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ to Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, the debate of how we might both recognise and set ourselves apart from our creative predecessors has long troubled all types of cultural production. In Woolf’s own context of international modernism, corresponding questions were emerging specifically around the practice of translation as it was taking form as an autonomous discipline. Rebecca Watson’s January 2026 review of Woolf Works for the Financial Times draws this link to McGregor’s treatment of his sources: ‘The ballet brings to mind the art of translation, where the task is not to find the literal replica of a word in a different language but instead to find a way of transposing meaning, rhythm and local association in order to get closest to intention.’

Woolf was thinking on parallel terms in the mid 1920s. Having taken Greek classes since the age of fifteen, the title of her 1925 essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is a tongue in cheek reminder that nothing can be fully known or grasped when taken out of its native form, whether across languages or mediums. Writing that it is not only ‘vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek’, but that it is ‘all the more strange […] that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek’, she articulates a disregard for the desire to get as close as possible to the source or to seek ownership of something that is ultimately ungraspable, instead revelling in the inevitable loss that comes with the transference of meaning. Four years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, T.S. Eliot translated St. John Perse’s collection of poems Anabase from its original French. As if to justify his approach, he adds to the 1949 revised edition:

When this translation was made, Saint-John Perse was little known outside of France. The translator, perhaps for the reason that he was introducing the poem to the English-speaking public, was then concerned, here and there, less with rendering the exact sense of a phrase, than with coining some phrase in English which might have equivalent value; he may even have taken liberties in the interest of originality, and sometimes interposed his own idiom between author and reader.

Curiously referring to himself in the third person, Eliot forges a distance from his translation that recalls how descriptions of Woolf Works keep the source texts at arm’s length. The argument here aligns with Woolf’s in ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, and forms part of a larger international modernist project that sought to trouble the boundaries between source text and target text . Eliot and Woolf propose a creative, generous approach that Woolf Works tentatively toys with but never fully commits to, underscoring how the piece might have benefitted from replacing the search for ‘exactitude’ with more ‘interpo[sing of its] own idiom’. In the thick of our contemporary obsession with adaptation, perhaps we should take a leaf out of Woolf and Eliot’s book, acknowledging loss as an inevitable part of the process and shifting the goal away from minimising it to making it a part of adaptation in itself. Maybe only then can we free adaptation from its tunnel-visioned pursuit of fidelity.

McGregor’s ballet does ultimately ‘capture’ something of the novels, not through faithful or total transposal, but in illustrating how attempts at fidelity can only ever offer a snapshot of something that only ever really exists in the individual reader’s imagination. In the end, therefore, maybe this isn’t so much a critique of Woolf Works than a veneration of Woolf, the immensity of her novels and the idiosyncrasies of individual forms, differences we would do better to foreground than to dilute in the pursuit of fidelity.

Lola Gabellini-Fava is a PhD student at UCL, researching the relationship between asemic writing and the spatial metaphors of literary criticism in the twentieth century. Her research is funded by the Quirk PhD Scholarship, made possible by The Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment Fund. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and French from the University of Oxford, and an MPhil in English Studies from the University of Cambridge.