★★
Maybe playing with nonsense is the whole point here. Maybe those of us who still yearn for a thread of hardened narrative running through theatre might be misguided. Or maybe, this show is alternative theatre gone a bit too far. As part of Voila Festival 2025, Woo Woolf challenges plot-based theatre in sometimes fascinating but often incomprehensible ways.
The play’s all-migrant ensemble certainly challenge how we have conceived and will continue to conceive womanhood through the writing of Virgina Woolf. Yet, it’s always important for the audience to be able to follow fully the writer’s train of thought. Knowing what’s going on this play just becomes increasingly too difficult.
It all gets a little bit lost in translation. Ensemble Not Found, the production company, attempt to create a world of light, sound and sensory experience, that attempts to cross timelines between three different women through none other than Virginia Woolf. We do experience moments of brilliance: pregnancy leads to birth in an intriguing interpretive dance; an AI interface becomes a conversational force with the cast through a clever use of projection; language is explored to the full through national identity, poetry and familiar quotes. Unfortunately, at it’s very base, all Woo Woolf’s characters are named Mary and though one is a fortune teller, another is a dancer and the last is a translator, it’s very easy to get them mixed up. Nevertheless, Sanli Wang and Jovienne Jin pull everything out of the theatrical magic box together as a technical team. Coherency is breathed mostly through stagecraft into this rather odd multilingual dreamscape inspired by the metaphor of Virgina Woolf.
Some poems take the audience’s breath away and work with sequences of movement to enjoy the absurdity of what it means to be human. Samuel Beckett would be proud especially as Woo Woolf commands that “if words fail, cook. If cooking fails, dance.” Indeed, Wency Lam makes her mark instrumentally in contemporary dance sections about cooking, laughter and growing up.
Overall, the play is a theatrical experimentation straight out of a devising exercise that could do with a bit of tweaking here and there. There is certainly much to commend in the challenge of gender norms, nationhood and traditional identity that this bizarre stream of consciousness writing provides. Sometimes you must kill the best ideas for the sake of clarity, comfort and enjoyment, especially when you only have one hour per performance.
Woo Woolf will be performed at The Cockpit Theatre on 9 November.
Words by Harry Speirs
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