In thinking of the ensemble as the flesh of the world of The Waves, it is important to remember that it is an aspect of this world normally invisible. Because in the performance the audience is able to see that which connects, the process of creating the image on the screen, it is this process that becomes the focus. While it is clear that the characters on the screen feel hopelessly disconnected from one another and are shown alone on the screen more often than not, the ensemble on the stage offers a different possibility of existence, something beyond the character’s grasp, perhaps, but possible, even attainable, for the audience.

After the lights go down at the Duke theatre on Saturday, November 15, 2008, an image appears on the screen hung upstage: the waves breaking on the shore. Sea-sounds come through speakers. Onstage: bodies moving in the dark, quickly, quietly, barely discernible. The image disappears. A moment of darkness, and then, the sound of a match being lit: a hand is revealed, and the face of a woman seated at a table with a cigarette in her mouth. Once her cigarette is lit, she takes a drag, and then reaches forward, turns on a table lamp, and, in an upper-middle class British accent, begins to recite into a microphone an excerpt from the opening interlude of The Waves. “As they neared the shore each wave rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand.”^[18] Throughout the performance, she appears in the same manner: from darkness, the light of a match reveals her face, her cigarette (or sometimes cigar) is lit by the hand holding the match, she takes a drag, turns on her table lamp, and begins to recite text — either from an interlude in The Waves, or excerpts from “Sketches of the Past,” Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essay. The smoking, the accent, and the text make it clear that, in these moments, this actress is portraying Virginia Woolf.

In thinking of the ensemble as the flesh of the world of The Waves, it is important to remember that it is an aspect of this world normally invisible.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Virginia Woolf operates under different rules than the other characters in Waves. The actor that portrays Woolf portrays her primarily onstage rather than onscreen, and primarily alone, without much aid from the rest of the ensemble, though even these “rules” are bent and broken throughout the course of the performance. Once, she is filmed looking in a mirror. At another point, she appears onstage but does not speak: instead she rests her head in her hands, and another ensemble member, with her hand on Woolf’s shoulder, recites her text. When the actress portraying Woolf is not doing so, she melts seamlessly back into the ensemble, assisting in the creation of the other characters. Thus, Woolf is separated from the other characters, but the boundaries are blurry, they shift and sway as often as she appears.

Early on in The Waves when the characters are still children, Bernard and Susan come upon an estate called Elvedon that Bernard imagines to be an unknown land, which Briggs identifies as “another version of Eden.”^[19] In the house, they see a lady who “sits between the two long windows, writing.”^[20] Bernard and Susan recall this woman writing at several points throughout the novel. As Briggs says, this woman is “an image of the novelist writing the book … her written words correspond to Bernard’s spoken phrases.”^[19]

Though the appearance is brief, Woolf inserts herself into The Waves, as writer, as creator. But her presence can be found beyond this cameo. Like all Woolf novels, various characters in The Waves can be traced back to key figures in Woolf’s life. Susan resembles Woolf’s sister Vanessa, Louis is reminiscent of her good friend T.S. Eliot (born in St. Louis), and she gives Jinny her own childhood nickname. All characters resemble some aspect of Woolf, though some more than others: Bernard, in his love of phrasemaking and desire to be a writer, and Rhoda in her “self-doubt and social anxieties as a young woman, as well as her recurrent failures of confidence, her nervousness and impulse towards death.”^[21] Percival, a character whose inner thoughts the reader never receives, but is nonetheless central to the text (as all the other characters love and admire him), is modeled after Woolf’s brother Thoby, who, like Percival, died at a young age.