VIRGINIA WOOLF’S novels Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, along with extracts from her letters, essays and diaries, are the source material for this new work by the great choreographer Wayne McGregor.

In collaboration with composer-musician Max Richter, he’s come up with a thrilling interpretation of the literary source material.

It’s a spectacular triptych which homes in on micro-moments of emotion and tragedy in the writings, with the sensual narrative drive of I Now, I Then a departure from McGregor’s usual adventures in abstraction.

His scrupulous attention to physical detail and characterisation and Richter’s unrelenting cycles of melodic beauty draw a full-blooded response from the dancers.

The second part, Becoming, dazzles with its sumptuously designed costumes and a matrix of complex and rapid sequences as the dancers work with and against the time structures. The score, given a bravura performance by the orchestra, and the electronic sound shake the auditorium to its core.

The final work, The Waves, is an all-consuming experience. It opens with a reference to the suicide note Woolf wrote to her husband and develops motifs of hypnotic movement in which Beatriz Stix-Brunell’s nymphet performance is show-stopping.

Edward Watson’s expressiveness, speed and precision thrills too but it is Alessandra Ferri’s performance as a woman moving between fiction and reality that brings this extraordinary trilogy to an unbearably poignant conclusion.

Review by Peter Lindley