“The Waves” Crash at the Duke
I had high hopes for the National Theatre’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel “The Waves,” which I saw last night at the Duke on 42nd Street. Ben Brantley in the New York Times had given it a rave, calling the piece “a remarkable, genre-defying work…that raises the bar for literary adaptations.” In the event, I found myself much closer in agreement with Brantley’s colleague Charles Isherwood, who in this weekend’s Arts and Leisure section writes, “I couldn’t help thinking that I had never seen performers work so hard, with such choreographic precision and hair-trigger timing, to such meager aesthetic effect.”
