Cruise inside some minds...

The Waves (Lowry Quays)

LIKE the real thing on a choppy day, this stage realisation of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel can be a slightly sickly experience.

Think stream-of-consciousness text converted to a play for eight voices, TV cameras, close-up microphony and sound effects, and you’re getting close.

It’s a bit like sitting-in on the recording of a BBC radio play from 40 years ago, with the effects — both sound and vision — minutely choreographed and directed then discarded, much as in the book.

Not that Woolf’s novel has a story, as such. This was her most original work, following a group of friends from nursery to middle age through what goes on inside their heads, rather than in their lives.

Woolf deliberately pared her writing to the barest detail, creating a multitude of fragments, scenes, thoughts and interludes from childhood holidays to London between the wars, the whole combining to tell the inner stories of Neville, Bernard, Louis, Susan, Rhoda and Jinny and also that of a seventh character, Percival, whose life and death is a catalyst for them all.

So far so good: using the sea as a metaphor for the unrelenting passage of time, Woolf washes through their fears, loves and loneliness with unremitting greyness and this, mirrored in Katie Mitchell’s National Theatre presentation, makes the show both fascinating and just a little too much — even cut by almost 30 minutes from its NT debut two years ago.

The stage is black and surrounded by racks holding masses of props and equipment: two TV cameras are continually moved around; actors visualise character actions while their colleagues speak their inner thoughts while still others add sound and visual effects for display on a large projection screen — walking, opening doors, spraying water on clear plastic set-up as rain-soaked windows, and so on.

The whole thing is an event of amazing theatricality and cleverness, with visuals conjured from just a few props to show how much can be intimated with so little — which is, of course, the book’s forte.

The actors — Kate Duchene, Anastasia Hille, Kristin Hutchinson, Sean Jackson, Stephen Kennedy, Liz Kettle, Paul Ready and Jonah Russell — are an extraordinary ensemble. But in the end, what’s the point of putting visuals to thoughts, when the latter are infinitely more powerful?