Off West End Hit: Woolfs Waves Shines Bright

 The Waves (Jermyn Street Theatre)

Verdict: Not drowning but waving

Star Rating: 4/5 

Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness 1931 novel is a swirling tide of voices, overlapping and interweaving like waves.

It’s a near impossible read. Yet in Flora Wilson Brown’s rich, rewarding play, the characters interact in a gently floating narrative, with Woolf’s elusive wit bobbing to the surface.

They meet as children and remain loosely – but also tightly – connected as they grow older, emerging as distinctive personalities.

Each embodies a different way of experiencing life.

Diffident Rhoda (Ria Zmitrovicz) holds the piece together, anxious and detached, always on the outside looking in – unlike Syakira Moeladi’s perfect, pretty, confident Jinny, who even as a child is at the centre of things.

Earthy, unaffected Susan (Breffni Holahan), a country girl, grows up to keep sheep and have babies.

Aspiring poet Neville (Pedro Leandro) is said to be ‘delicate’ – which turns out to mean gay.

Bernard (Tom Varey) likes to make sense of life, create order.

And Archie Backhouse’s ambitious Louis, despised for being the son of an Australian banker, is made to feel an outsider, which is possibly what draws him and Rhoda together.

Idealised Percival is absent, but given a powerful presence, voiced by the others.

In Júlia Levai’s superb, precisely performed production, we meet the six wearing T-shirts, their names in capitals.

As they move into their teens, twenties and so on, they graduate into shirts and blouses, jackets, longer coats, timeless until a few furious swearwords bring them boldly into the here and now.

On the stage is a little square of earth: a flower bed and a grave. Life and death.

Percival’s death is a turning point, shattering for them as a group and as individuals. His life has ended – and yet life goes on.

We hear it in this piece, in the sound of waves, rising, swelling, breaking. Haunting yet heartening, beautifully done.

The Waves runs at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London until May 30. 

ON TOUR...BY LIBBY PURVES

Caroline (New Wolsey, Ipswich & touring) 

Verdict: Raves, romance and rage in the 60s

Star Rating: 4/5 

Here’s an exhilarating good-hearted jukebox musical from an East Anglian touring consortium: five theatres with a feel for the North Sea coast.

It celebrates the 1960’s pirate station Caroline, a battered ship anchored off that coast, beaming all-day pop to bored teenagers fed up with the Light Programme.

Vikki Stone builds it around a fictional couple – shopgirl Caroline and DJ Robbie (a bit like ).

Haunting the record shop and hanging around on Clacton seafront, Robbie is recruited by entrepreneur Declan (echoing the real Ronan O’Rahilly) who saw an untapped market in teens craving glamour, fashion...and music to move to.

Up against them is the Postmaster-General (Gareth Cooper), who hastily brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act. As in the Richard Curtis flop The Boat That Rocked, he’s turned into a puritanical right-wing villain, while in reality it was Tony Benn – pillar of the Left and more worried about interference with shipping radios.

Indeed, it was also Benn who suggested the BBC should start an all-day pop channel, but its Chairman scolded: ‘It would be like having the pubs open all day!’

In the end, the BBC read the room; launched Radio 1 – and poached the pirates’ DJs.

It’s not just pensioner-nostalgia (though a grandad next to me murmured ‘I was a scooter-boy!’ in the seafront scenes).

Two newer generations also cheered every roaring number, reminding us what saxophone-driven fun pop was before today’s morose break-up songs.

Everyone erupts at Not Fade Away and My Generation, and there’s sweetness in What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted.

A nimble company of ten actor-musicians is kept moving by director Douglas Rintoul (the Postmaster-General suddenly taking over the drum kit).

Claire Lee Shenfield’s Caroline is terrific, blasting out Lulu’s terrifying Shout! as she marries her Robbie on the ship ‘under Panamanian law’; then crooning ‘You’re my world!’ when it turns out she’s both pregnant AND not technically wed.

The simple plot is saved from blokeyness by her scenes with a supportive friend Mary, and her grumpy washtub mother.

Jake Halsey-Jones’s Robbie is adorable, too, cracking terrible DJ jokes between jingles for mercifully forgotten brands.

It breathes silly, brave defiant youth, old -style.

For tour dates see carolineanewmusical.com