A fluid Orlando for our times

Orlando (Jermyn Street Theatre, London) Verdict: Don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf ★★★★✩

ORLANDO is an exquisite, rosy-cheeked, 16-yearold wannabe poet with a shock of burnished copper hair and ‘the shapeliest legs a nobleman has ever stood in’. When an ancient Queen Elizabeth spots him skating along a frozen Thames and cannot resist, it’s the beginning of a busy love life.

A century later, Orlando wakes up as a Victorian woman in lace, velvet and a long skirt, primed to say ‘yes, please’ to every question, and she wonders if woman are ‘obedient, chaste and scented’ by nature or if such things are learned.

Orlando, is still the same person, with the same buoyant personality, but he can see the world from both sides now.

A deliciously androgynous Taylor McClaine makes an arresting debut in Sarah Ruhl’s playful stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling, gender-bending, shape-shifting 1928 novel. Originally considered a fantasy and ‘a literary frivolity’, the questions it raises about sex, gender, labels and conventional expectations feel real and pertinent. Indeed, today it seems as much an expression of Woolf’s frustrations as a woman and a writer of her time (in spite of being part of the boho Bloomsbury set) as a bid for liberation from rigid constraints. Life, as suggested by designer Ceci Calf’s cardboard proscenium arch placed mid-stage, is a performance. And everyone is a person of many parts, not necessarily confined to one particular gender, nor attracted or attractive to another specific gender. A versatile cast of five actors pulling on hats, ruffs, coats, frocks and trousers to enact dozens of characters over five centuries of changing fashions, music and customs and love affairs, illustrate the point perfectly. Director Stella Powell-Jones gives this fluid and fluent production the feel of a dream or a dance. Good, if giddying.