Waves - National Theatre Tour - director of photography / video by Leo Warner

About this project

Waves - the first collaboration between video designer Leo Warner and director Katie Mitchell that premiered in the National Theatre in 2006 - was revived in 2008 for an international tour.

The show re-opened in the National Theatre's Cotesloe auditorium, before touring the UK, Europe and North America.

Reviews (2008 international tour)

"Life unfolds in a series of exquisite contradictions in “Waves,” a remarkable, genre-defying work from the National Theater of Great Britain that raises the bar for literary adaptations. The world that is so magically summoned in this improbable page-to-stage translation of “The Waves,” Virginia Woolf’s most challenging novel, is one of fragmentation and flux, of impenetrable solidity and ghostly transparency, of simultaneous bloom and decay."

New York Times

"The triumph of the production, however, was Leo Warner's astonishing work as video director. Scrambling at highly controlled top speed, the cast assembled cameras, set tables and dragged colourful sleeves over their black-shirted arms to create live-action footage of everything from elaborate dinner parties to the intimate reading of a crucial letter. From Virginia Woolf's rather arid original, Mitchell and Warner created something which could only have worked in a theatre, but which ran riot with unexpected effects and left the audience marvelling."

The Guardian

About the original production

"The Waves at the National Theatre is that rarely sighted beast, a performance where theatre and video come together so seamlessly and complement each other so exquisitely it is as if Mitchell, her actors and video artist Leo Warner have created an entirely new art form."

Lyn Gardner, THE GUARDIAN

Please click here for information and reviews about the original production.