Friday March 29, 2024
ORLANDO
Review

ORLANDO

November 16 2015

ORLANDO, Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 13 November-19 December 2015. Photography by Prudence Upton: above - John Gaden and Jacqueline Mackenzie; right Jacqueline Mackenzie and Matthew Backer.

Director Sarah Goodes’ program notes for Orlando  quote from a letter by a friend of Virginia Woolf in which she writes of The Lighthouse (1927), “I suspect for instance that arriving at the Lighthouse has a symbolic meaning that escapes me.” To which Woolf replied, “I meant nothing by the Lighthouse…Whether it is right or wrong I don’t know; but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.”

This could apply to every ambiguity ever depicted on a stage – or elsewhere. Many humans seem compelled to find concrete meaning where the author intended none, and then wonder why they get lost or terminally puzzled along the way. This applies particularly to Woolf’s fabled 1928 novel, the playfully titled Orlando: A Biography, in which the youth of the title grows up, lives for several centuries, becomes a woman along the way, has lovers of both genders yet remains insouciantly fluid in all things. Try to straitjacket that in everyday concepts of meaning and madness that way comes.

Most of the dialogue in Orlando  is taken straight from Woolf’s fabled 1928 novel, yet American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation resembles a speed-read, even though it runs to two hours, straight through. Blink and you may miss something, fail to concentrate and you could well end up lost somewhere in the dazzling centuries of Orlando’s existence. But no matter…

Orlando  was Woolf’s homage to her lover Vita Sackville West, a woman whose own circumstances are central to understanding the novel and the play. Vita was from one of England’s oldest aristocratic families, immensely privileged and born with the taste of entitlement in her mouth. As a youngster she roamed and grew to adore the family’s ancestral home, Knole in Kent, one of the largest, grandest and most romantic in the country and said to have a room for every day of the year (as does the palace in Orlando).

Nevertheless, there was a dark side to the tall, dark, handsome Vita whose lovers were many and varied and whose husband loved men too. She knew that because she was female, she would never inherit Knole: it would go to the eldest of the male line. It was an injustice that marked her life and could be seen as the broken heart of Woolf’s seemingly lightheartedly satirical paean to her great love.

As it is, in the play, fact and fiction, imagination and memory meld and collide, reminding us that none of these can be neatly packaged nor manageably corralled. In the end, all may be distilled into one container called experience, yet still remain volatile and unreliable.

“Nothing more disorders time than contact with the arts,” complains an aged Queen Elizabeth I (brilliant John Gaden) whose pronouncement could be the tongue-in-cheek voice of the author. So we see the teenage Orlando (a flop-haired boyish Jacqueline Mackenzie) being happily fawned upon by the Queen as she strides about in doublet and hose; and a reasonably impressive codpiece.

ORLANDO

To get around the problem of myriad characters and a dizzying array of places and times – and the mischievously complex story – Ruhl simply ignores many and uses those she employs as observing narrators, when they’re not taking part in the action. As well as a tireless Mackenzie, who convincingly starts off as a coltish boy, becomes a boyish female and finally a world-weary 36-year-old woman there is a small, multi-tasking cast of six. 

As well as the melancholically majestic (and hilarious) John Gaden, there is Matthew Backer (Desdemona and Orlando’s eventual husband Marmaduke), Garth Holcombe (Archduke and  Archduchess), Anthony Taufa (Poet and Othello) and finally, the sadly under-utilised Luisa Hastings Edge whose telling appearances as Orlando’s faithless Russian lover Sasha are all too brief. 

It’s a flaw in Ruhl’s adaptation that she casts the men as busily re-costuming gender-crossers, but leaves the one female to languish off-stage for much of the play: a bit of ingenuity and wit would have her taking on another – male – role that would add a measure of symmetry and piquancy to the structure.

That aside, the production is entertaining and intriguing. Sarah Goodes, designer Renee Mulder and lighting designer Damien Cooper utilise the Drama Theatre’s depth and width and the double revolve to great effect, in particular when Orlando and Sasha go ice skating up the frozen Thames during the “Great Frost” of 1808-9 – listen out for the “skrrr-skrrr-skrrr of the skate blades (sound Steve Francis). 

Small tableaux of furniture and effects occasionally twirl by but in the main the focus is a simple centrepiece structure of two timber staircases. These are pushed and pulled to various configurations – palace, ship, a bit of London, a corner of mansion and so on. And the other focal point is the occasional close harmony singing by all cast members that conjures up the essence of Elizabethan and later life (composer and musical director Alan John).

Altogether, this Orlando  is as curious and capricious as one might anticipate, although the undercurrent of desolation that’s present in the novel and Sally Potter’s beautiful 1992 movie is missing, but it’s well worth a visit.

 

 

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