Isobel Waller-Bridge review – wit and emotion in abundance

Isobel Waller-Bridge has become such an established composer for film, television and theatre that it seems astonishing that this short, low-key date is being trumpeted as her UK debut. You might have heard her neurotic orchestral score for Munich: The Edge of War, her quirky period pastiches for Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Emma and the abstract splurges of noise that soundtracked her sister Phoebe’s series Fleabag, but tonight’s show concentrated on her more low-key, personal work. Much of it draws from her recent EP VIII, a project with the 12 Ensemble which came out a couple of months ago. But you get the impression that Waller-Bridge is already itching to move on. She uses this show as a chance to rework some of that material, adding a saxophonist to the string quartet and also integrating her own piano playing into new pieces.

Some of the pieces really come to life on stage. On Trace, she alternates between a series of strident, baroque string arpeggios and creaky, atonal noises from the string section, as if manically toggling between the 17th and 21st centuries. A similar pattern occurs on Daylight, where lush, minor-key Romanticism collapses into polite avant garde freak outs. A jerky, minor-key composition called An Exercise in Restraint (Until You Go) – apparently a sonic representation of the “wit of the staircase” moments she experiences – starts to take on a shivery otherness, like a Renaissance chant put through an ambient filter. And the saxophonist locates new dimensions to these pieces – adding suitably ethereal textures on the baritone and curious countermelodies on the tenor.

But the most interesting bits are where Waller-Bridge debuts new material written for piano and ensemble. She plays minimalist patterns on the piano – often repeated notes, often repetitive vamps or a series of long, sustained chords – and these harmonic ideas are then interrogated or sometimes mutilated by the rest of the ensemble, with orchestrations which verge into gentle discordancy. There is a wit in abundance here but there is also plenty of emotion.