VIRGINIA WOOLF

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 942, 30 August 1957, Page 25

VIRGINIA WOOLF

[HE WAVES, tegarded by some critics as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, has been adapted and produced for the BBC "by Louis MacNeice, This radio version of the novel will be heard next | week from the YCs, who will also be playing the BBC Portrait of Virginia Woolf. The Waves deals with the psychological development and personal relationships of six English children, with the rise and fall of the waves of the sea and the ascent and decline of the sun in the sky to symbolise the growth of their personalities and the progress of their lives. Lotis MacNeice, writing in the Radio Times, described this novel as her most experimental. "I can think of no other book in the language like it,’ he said. "It is written, except for short choral interluces, entirely in the first person-or rather in six first persons. Three men and three women are followed from childhood to late middle age through a series of soliloquies. They are all extremely sensitive to what is happening round them and also to their own reactions to these happenings; they are all, like their creator, most cot.scious of the passing of time. Oddly enough, though not themselves comic, they remind me more of the comic characters in Dickens; each keeps flashing his trademark; their lives are made up of refrains. There is a seventh character, Percival, who never speaks, but who serves as a focal point for all of them." In cutting this full-length novel down to two hours on the air, Louis MacNeice has included excerpts from each of the sections | divided by the choral interludes. "I have had to leave out many | magnificent passages, and some brute facts, such as Rhoda’s suicide. But in this book it is not the brute facts that count. .. On February 7, 1931, Virginia Woolf's diary noted: "I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves." This quotation begins the Portrait of Virginia Woolf, which. includes her sister's glimpse of their childhood, her husband’s description of her method of writing, and reminiscences from her friends, including George Rylands, the Cambridge Professor of English Literature, who compiled the programme, which ends with a recording of Virginia Woolf herself.