★★★★★
Orlando is biography. And yet, it’s not the life of one specific human being that is the heart of this story, but the soul of all – infinite and defiant to the boundaries of time and gender – that breathes and breaks throughout the play.
Written by Virginia Woolf as a novel but astutely adapted for the stage by Sarah Ruhl, Orlando walks abstractly in the footsteps of Vita Sackville-West, an intimate friend of Woolf’s who fell in love with a diplomat only to realise they were both homosexuals.
With a five-star gender-bending cast, led by the enthralling Jacqueline McKenzie (Orlando) and supported by the enigmatic and equally entertaining John Gaden (Elizabeth I), this delicious concoction of classic and contemporary, story and chorus, begins as a single atom: Orlando, who is surrounded by a husk of youth in the Elizabethan Age.
Throughout his lifetime this husk is shed as the character of Orlando develops. In the 16th century he is a boy, leggy and hopeful, his manhood a stark feature of his costume and a reminder of who he is in that present moment. It is here where Elizabeth I bestows him with riches and rank and he meets Russian princess Sasha, who whisks him away only to leave him heartbroken.
By the 17th century, Orlando is courted by an archduchess and his gender begins to alter, so much so that by the 18th and 19th centuries, Orlando (as a female) finds herself entertaining the privileges and abhorring the penalties of the other sex.
The pace changes at the fifth and final incarnation as Orlando is thrown into our present. It’s not a self-revelatory moment, nor does it uphold the story or comedy of previous reincarnations, but that is perhaps the point, as it is this “living in the present” that is the onus of Woolf’s work. The soul is an androgynous, continuous essence while the shell is merely a vehicle to live in the world – and live it does; in the profound words of Orlando, the remarkable costumes of Renée Mulder, and the lilting song of the six-strong chorus who seamlessly weave soft lyrics into each and every moment of this endless human journey.
Orlando is playing at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until Saturday December 19.
