The Wild Goose... – Review: Orlando

In the year after I came out as trans, three separate relatives gifted me copies of Orlando. In some people’s minds there’s an equation: trans + books = Orlando. I hated it – not Virginia Woolf’s brilliant satirical anti-biography love letter, which I’ve read a million times and love – but the equation of that (irreducible) with my own experience (differently irreducible). Orlando isn’t about being trans or being gay in lots of the ways transness and gayness have been important to me: maybe because it was written by a cis-identified bisexual fairly polyamorous woman (Woolf) about another cis-identified bisexual fairly polyamorous woman (her sometime lover Vita Sackville-West). What it is about is fluidity, the character of Orlando herself as transposed through time (as a pseudobiographical Vita), and how much Woolf liked Vita’s fine shapely legs; all things that award-winning playwright Neil Bartlett’s theatre adaptation (performed today in the Barron as part of Freshers Drama Festival) seems radically to misunderstand – a frustrating hindrance to an impressive production clearly filled with passion and care.

ID: the cast of Orlando crowding round Eilidh Read in bed. Credit: Elahe Sherrell.

As a rule I believe student theatre reviews should focus on the quality of the acting or the production in a show, instead of the script (especially if it isn’t student-written) – but rules are made to be broken! For someone adapting Orlando, Bartlett doesn’t seem to be very interested in the character of Orlando, whose personality has been left out for brevity; nor in Woolf herself, here conflated with her narrator. Instead, Bartlett reduces them to figureheads: of girlbossing and queerness (gaybossing?) in an very black-and-white imagined past. 

ID: Eilidh Read standing reading a book. Credit: Elahe Sherrell.

Orlando is missing not only her shapely legs, but also 'The Oak Tree' (the long poem she spends her whole life working towards), and even her ultimate marital ‘ecstasy’ – her ideal relationship with the similarly gender non-conforming Shel (who spends much of his time sailing repeatedly and heroically around Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale (the only way to be masculine in the 20th century – sufferers of the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ take notes)) is reconfigured as abandonment by a neglectful husband, to enable an ‘urgh… MEN!’ joke. 

Orlando was published in 1928, and the romantic relationships in it are all cheekily ‘heterosexual’ on a surface level. It’s now 2026, and it’s ok to be gay (radical statement I know); Bartlett signals this by inserting lines pretty close to ‘wow I sure do love lesbian sex’ (a sentiment I can understand, but…). It is also ok to be bisexual, and to be polyamorous. Woolf was a real person, and the inclusion of her as a character foregrounds Orlando’s complicated relationship with real biography, and the real person it was written about, Sackville-West. I think real people deserve respect. Woolf and Sackville-West were stably and increasingly happily married to husbands with whom they had sometimes romantic relationships, and they also often had relationships with other people – but Bartlett’s script downplays all of this in favour of #doomedyuri

In this play, Woolf is not a single character, but a chorus. Woolf loved to blend characters’ thoughts and selves into a sort of chorus of humanity, and the novel Orlando ends with a chorus of Orlando’s many selves and memories from across the ages – probably that’s where Bartlett gets his idea from – but I’m not sure what purpose the chorus of Virginias serves in terms of creating meaning. They split lines between themselves, or exclaim loudly in sync, and they arrange themselves in places: all this induces affect, but that affect does not lead to any meaning I could locate. The play begins with the Virginias exclaiming ‘this is my story’, but it really isn’t; it should be Vita’s story. There’s an issue with voice and identity at the heart of the play – not a chorus, but a confusion. Various references to Woolf are pastiched in, as if the play’s about her – the bells from Mrs Dalloway, the sea from To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Years – alongside random famous Shakespeare quotes, and Wuthering Heights (topical!). Maybe we as the audience are supposed to be so proud merely of recognising these names and quotes that we don’t feel the need to look for any coherent meaning behind them. 

ID: Nina Brook-Lloyd and Eilidh Read at a table with Virginias behind. Credit: Elahe Sherrell.

The enormous, and very talented, cast of this show is often really impressive, and I wish there were consistently more of them on stage at once, doing things and being characters other than Virginia. The play shines when the actors are allowed out of their Virginia-shaped prison, and can embody the varied cast of people Orlando encounters across time. The script’s humour is reliant on simplistic stereotype, but the power of acting – the magic of theatre! – can enrich its characters into more than that.

Nina Brook-Lloyd is really brilliant as the seductive and moving Sasha, and then as the wildly energetic Shel (bizarre to have these two played by the same actor, but Nina pulls it off). Their Russian accent is extremely impressive to my ears (whose only education in Russian accents has been Heated Rivalry), and they’re hilarious and genuinely sexy (the intimacy coordination is excellent throughout – credit to Sarayah Shaw). They ask ‘voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?’ – just like in A Streetcar Named Desire (and the French language)! Maybe we’re only allowed references to texts on the A-level English syllabus.

Poppy Kimitris is hilarious as a foul-mouthed naval officer (‘oh my cocking God!’), and then very funny and persuasive as Nell (presumably Gwyn – the only remaining celebrity cameo; there’s only a passing snipe at witty Mr Pope, and no appearance at all of the fat shabby Elizabethan poet with globed and clouded eyes). Poppy’s singing voice is astonishing, and her comfortably holding Orlando and singing ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies’ while her flatmates aggressively make out beside her was for me the most human and moving and relatable moment of the entire play.

Lev Dormidontov steals scenes as the inimitable Archduchess Harriet, sweeping in with fan and mask and grandiloquence. Lev transforms that into raw pathos for the revelation of his gender, remade by Bartlett into a scene of total gay male abjection, which would almost be very moving if it was only a little better-written.

Roslyn Bates is Orlando’s long-suffering nurse, and also the deliverer of the script’s endless insufferable exposition, and it’s a testament to Roslyn’s acting that I’m able to stop rolling my eyes at the things coming out of her mouth for long enough to enjoy the sentiment behind them. She’s a rock of normalcy and care and consistent energy that keeps the play going.

ID: Nina Brook-Lloyd and Eilidh Read sitting on a bed. Credit: Elahe Sherrell.

Eilidh Read as Orlando suddenly bursts out of the bed she’s been hiding in the entire time the audience slowly filed in – a brilliant effect! – and asks ‘Who am I, and who do I love?’. Orlando spends most of the show in this questioning mode, only given the chance to react to what he/she is being told about the date or society or her own age – generally with befuddlement or frustration. This doesn’t leave much room for character-building, so we rely entirely on Eilidh’s charisma as an actor to keep us engaged. Not to mention, even though we see plenty of Eilidh’s legs (no complaints), they are only mentioned in dialogue three times! Outrageous. 

Berit Pigott’s costuming is consistently excellent, not only helping easily place every character but also often looking genuinely amazing (Shel’s three-quarter pinstripe trousers! Orlando’s puffy blue-and-gold short shorts! The inimitable lobster jacket!), and almost all of Orlando’s costume changes take place on stage, a lovely touch executed smoothly. The Barron is set up in the traverse with a raised stage at one end, which tragically limits audience capacity but creates an impressively large space for the actors to use, which in some of the play’s most impressive blocking moves fluidly between functioning like an end-on stage and the traverse – Orlando sitting at a table as the ambassador to Constantinople, looking out over his balcony, then falling into his long sleep in the bed, with the Virginias rushing around him. This huge space is lit by Kyra Goudsmit, with some very nice colour choices, and enhanced with choice sound effects by Charlie Renshaw.

Maybe you’ve been waiting for me to say something about transness. Most of Bartlett’s script after Orlando changes gender has to be spent reminding the audience that the patriarchy is kinda problematic and that the word ‘bitch’ can be insulting, but there’s a little monologue that is at least implicitly trans-coded. ‘Some people actually wanted to kill me’ – ‘actually wanted to kill me’. Somehow this left me cold – it reminds me not of real discrimination against trans people, of grounded genuine experiences and trauma and actuality, but rather of the distinctive self-defensive, self-justifying cry of a cancelled Twitter pundit.

ID: Eilidh Read standing on a bed looking away. Credit: Elahe Sherrell.

Orlando is all about grasping at the unreachable, describing the indescribably rich, and finding joy in the failed attempt – in the stuff of living – but everything in Bartlett’s script feels reduced to the surface level. When Eilidh or Nina quote sections of Woolf’s writing in monologue it’s wonderful, but these are intermixed with sickeningly self-conscious shallow jokes which belong in a children’s show – as does the script’s portrayal of history. Everything has to be told to us, instead of shown or evoked. The audience can’t be expected to know anything at all, and certainly not to work it out by themselves – the Great Frost of 1607 needs to be spelled out twenty times over; the audience (and Orlando) need constantly to be reminded what year it is, that society was generally quite misogynist in that year, and that men are bad. The ending even needs to be entirely rewritten so the audience can be told how Virginia Woolf died, as if that bears the slightest relevance to Orlando or to her romantic relationship with Sackville-West (which ended six years prior). As my friend next to me remarked, when a female writer commits suicide, suddenly her life and all her works can only be interpreted as being in anticipation of that suicide.

This was a very fun show, with lots of amazing performances, enhanced by great tech and costumes. Many moments in it have stuck with me. Most of my frustrations with it are from its departures from the novel Orlando, but no-one I’ve spoken to about it has read the novel in its entirety. Sometimes oversimplifications (or misrepresentations) are useful for getting a simple point across.

Nevertheless – I enjoy pantomimes, but I don’t come to adaptations of Virginia Woolf to be called ‘boys and girls’. Bartlett’s script places Woolf and Sackville-West, some of the most independent women of their time, who fashioned lives and lovers and marriages that suited them, into the narrow and confined boxes of oppressed star-crossed lesbians. In service of the script’s over-simplistic girlboss narrative, Orlando is told pityingly at the end ‘if you could just live another century’. Was life so abject and contemptible for all the people of the past? Is it so infinitely better now? How, after reading Orlando, a celebration of finding ‘ecstasy’ in anything and everything in life, or after watching this evocative production, could anyone possibly believe that?

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other erin
[and the two wolves inside her]