The Waves (2026)

Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) is often regarded as her most radical novel. It follows six friends, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis, from childhood to old age, but without plot or dialogue in any conventional sense. The novel is made up of interior monologues, written in a stylised, rhythmic prose closer to poetry than to narrative. Woolf herself called the form a "playpoem". Nine short interludes frame the monologues and describe a single day by the sea, from sunrise to sunset. Hour by hour, the light, the waves and a garden change character, like a clock measuring out a life. At the centre of the circle of friends stands a seventh figure, Percival, who never speaks for himself. He dies young, and the rest of the novel circles around his death.

The Waves is less a story about particular people than a meditation on what it is to be human. It is about how a self is both distinct and flowing into others, and about time, loss, language and mortality. The wave becomes an image of a self that constantly breaks apart and takes shape again: "I am made and remade continually."

Woolf noted in her diary that she was writing The Waves "to a rhythm and not to a plot". I have tried to pursue this line of thought further in this piece. In the novel, the voices alternate and weave together. Here the two soloists are equal partners in conveying rhythm, mood and direction, with and without words. The work is in two movements. The first revolves around a self struggling to hold on to the body, and around language as something that both creates and confines. The second opens with pain for which there are no words, moves through the sea and the closeness of others, and ends in dissolution. Breath - inhaling and exhaling - and air sounds run through the entire orchestra from the very first bar.

- Therese Ulvo, 2026