Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, June 29.

Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works is a monumental act of artistic daring, claiming for dance the right, and the ability, to bring one of the great voices in English literature to the stage. The translation from printed word to wordless movement is of necessity very free but McGregor’s profound respect for Woolf is evident at every moment of this shape-shifting triptych. Woolf Works should send every viewer back to her trailblazing novels.

Those who are acquainted at least in passing with Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and, to a lesser extent, The Waves, would get the deepest satisfaction from Woolf Works but no one could fail to be moved and excited. And not just by the dances. The Royal Ballet, which was last seen in Australia in 2002, has in its ranks some of the world’s most distinctive and dramatically alert dancers.

Brisbane’s first cast – mostly the same as that in London’s 2015 premiere season – included Edward Watson, whose irretrievably broken soldier in the first part of Woolf Works was heart-stopping; Sydney-born Steven McRae, whose presence and speed were electric; Russian superstar Natalia Osipova, who had charisma to burn; and young principal Francesca Hayward, who darted and floated like a luminous dragonfly.

Above all Woolf Works had the apparently ageless Alessandra Ferri at its centre, as Clarissa Dalloway in the triptych’s first section and as Virginia Woolf in the third. She is still an extraordinarily eloquent dancer and, at 54, brought the wisdom born of experience to these stories of love, remembrance and loss. McGregor’s rigorous intellectualism was taken into another realm, that of deeply affecting emotional resonance.

Woolf Works begins with I now, I then, a distillation of Mrs Dalloway. A woman slides between present and past, remembering the joys and possibilities that have now evaporated. We see her glowing younger self (Beatriz Stix-Brunell), the man she might have married (Federico Bonelli) and the young woman she once kissed (Hayward). These shadows and reflections are seen more darkly in the figure of Septimus Smith, the soldier maddened by war. He too is haunted by thoughts of an unreachable ideal companion (Tristan Dyer).

On an austere set of revolving frames by Ciguë, illuminated softly by Lucy Carter’s elegiac lighting, memories float, intersect and dissipate. City sounds – bells, traffic, voices, the tick-tock of a day passing – waft through Max Richter’s superlative score.

McGregor’s choreography is delicate, restrained and very much on a human scale, even for Watson’s Septimus, whose anguish is palpable but tightly reined in. Richter’s music carries the load for him in huge sheets of dark sound, which retreat after Septimus and Clarissa have a moment together that isn’t in the novel but draws the threads together powerfully in the ballet (writer Uzma Hameed was the invaluable dramaturg).

The wow factor is sky-high in the swaggering second section, Becomings, which takes a flying leap from the shoulders of Orlando into a sci-fi world of Carter’s restless lasers, Moritz Junge’s punk-Elizabethan costumes, Richter’s electronica and top-gear momentum. The dance captures the tumbling energy of Woolf’s writing and a sense of the novel’s race through time although little of Woolf’s witty view of sexual politics.

The speedy, stretchy physicality puts us in more conventional – for him – McGregor territory and the cast of 12 goes at it with ferocious attack. Dancers move in and out of hazy corners to offer a glimpse of Orlando in his/her journey through gender and the centuries. Osipova and McRae are the clear standouts, with McRae doing Olympics-standard higher and faster feats and Osipova stunningly authoritative. She might not entirely bring to mind Woolf’s charming poet, with his “eyes like drenched violets”, but her command is complete.

The third section, Tuesday, contracts the multiple interior voices that intertwine in The Waves to a single viewpoint, that of the author as she chooses to end her life. Woolf wrote to her husband Leonard on a Tuesday, telling him how much happiness he had given her and that she could no longer go on. We had heard Woolf herself speaking at the beginning of the evening, in a BBC talk about language. In Tuesday her suicide letter is spoken beautifully in voiceover by Gillian Anderson as the work begins.

Dwarfed against a vast projection of breaking waves (film by Ravi Deepres) and enclosed in Richter’s heart-swelling score, Ferri as Woolf is buffeted by memories. This final short section is both itself and a circle back to the beginning: in an echo of I now, I then, a younger woman (Itziar Mendizabal) poignantly evokes a bright time when everything is still to come. In a further connection, Ferri is partnered tenderly by Bonelli, who gently lifts, tilts and sways her as if he were a ghost figure and she had already been claimed by the water. Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway, the creator and the created, are inseparable; indivisible perhaps.

A large corps of men, women and children comes and goes in surges like waves and flocks of birds but her aloneness is as complete as it is devastating.

Woolf Works ended on July 1 but more of the Royal’s exceptional dancers come to the Brisbane stage from July 5 in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale. The Brisbane season marks the first time the Royal has performed Woolf Works and The Winter’s Tale outside the UK, for which much thanks. It’s much more common for a company to decide that international touring requires the safety net, yet again, of Swan Lake.

The Queensland Symphony Orchestra is in the pit, and was in mighty form when conducted by the Royal’s music director Koen Kessels for Woolf Works. Conducting duties for The Winter’s Tale will be divided between QSO music director Alondra de la Parra and Royal Ballet guest conductor Tom Seligman.