I don’t normally review plays, but this is a legitimate exception I think given the strong literary link. Having said that I haven’t read this play’s source material, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name although I did have a fair idea what it was about.
The play’s website sets the scene for the audience like this:
In the court of Queen Elizabeth I, the young nobleman Orlando begins his search for identity as he embarks on one of the greatest adventures in all of literature. Travelling through time and place he is catapulted into the court of King James, falls in love with a Russian princess, witnesses London freeze over and wakes up under the blazing sun of Constantinople transformed into a young woman. She continues her journey up to the present day in search of happiness, self-knowledge and the courage to answer one fundamental question … who am I?
Our guide – and to an extent Orlando’s guide as well – is their maid or dresser, Mrs Grimsditch, who acts as a chorus, explaining events and giving background context. This comic character has a much more central role in this play than in the novel, and is almost a pantomime dame, breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the audience as “boys and girls, or whatever”. This evocation of the spirit of panto wasn’t fully committed to – there were several points when the character addressed the audience, pressing for a reply, only to either ignore or talk over the hesitant responses that emerged. I think you either need to lean into the audience participation/interaction or not, but half in half out is neither up nor down. There was a similar hesitancy to some of the timing of the performance, with slight delays in people coming in, or coming in a little too early. These were very minor issues which I assumed were due to the performance still settling down in its run.
The play runs for 90 minutes without an intermission. That might explain why the second section of the play seemed rushed – Orlando falls in love and marries in a just few lines, and their husband leaves almost immediately never to reappear. Centuries swish past and before you know it we are in 1928, then 1941 and moments later in the present.
The part of Virginia Woolf is played by nine identically dressed actors who swap smoothly in and out of other roles. The play’s programme suggest these roles represent different aspects of Woolf’s character – if that was the intention then it didn’t work. It was impossible to differentiate between the Woolf’s other than through obvious physical characteristics, and they seemed to largely serve as a handy standby cast of personnel ready to take on the next walk-on character in Orlando’s life story.
The play aspires to be a serious discussion of the role of gender and sex in society. There was a really strange decision early in the performance to show Orlando as having male genitalia which undermined any suggestion that their sex change halfway through the play was a conscious change in gender roles rather than a supernatural or magical transformation. I appreciate that Orlando’s 400 year life-span means the character is a symbolic representation rather than a realistic portrait of a young man or woman. But this production choice meant that the character literally changes their sex rather than their gender identity – in other words reducing them to their genitalia rather than the much broader interpretation of gender roles that the play discusses at other points. I think the play will still have inspired many discussions about the role of women in society – for example when Orlando returns from Turkey they find themselves disenfranchised and dispossessed of their property and position in society – but there was a literalness about this performance decision that I thought risked undermining the narrative.
I hesitate to comment on the central performance because I don’t really feel qualified to do so. I’m on the same page as the Time Out reviewer who said “There are lots of good things about this ‘Orlando’, but it’s just too brief, to not enough end. It’s fun, but it’s not doing full justice to either Virginia Woolf’s book or Emma Corrin’s performance.” I’m also unsure whether the reference to Woolf’s suicide was gratuitous or poignant (clearly what was being aimed at) – one the one hand ignoring the author’s fate might have been disrespectful, but it wasn’t given the time or space to be properly explored in the context of Woolf’s (rather than Orlando’s) life. It wasn’t just a spontaneous, out of the blue impulsive act but the end of an almost life-long mental health struggle which complex origins, none of which were referenced.
The play is at its best when it remembers and respects its source material. The evocation of the Great Frost of 1608/9 is extraordinary. This quote is from the novel, because I haven’t got access to the text of the play, but from what I remember it is accurately and closely followed, and needs little more by way of performance, set or special effects:
“Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda … Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad … Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.”
The Reading Bug 