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Mar. 2nd, 2018 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsLast night I went with some book club friends to go see Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Orlando at the Lyric Theater --
-- and, backtracking, it seems like Orlando is one of the books we read for book club last year that I never got around to writing up, though on further investigation I did apparently do so in 2008. This is interesting to recall now, as the only thing I remembered from that read ten years ago was the visual image of the carnival on the frozen Elizabethan Thames.
Anyway! Orlando is a book in which our noble protagonist starts out as an Elizabethan teenaged boy, spends four hundred years attempting to write a great poem about an oak tree, and ends up a 36-year-old woman in the 1920s. Ten years ago I seem to have been mostly struck by the gender aspects of the book, which are certainly notable, but it's also got a lot to say about writing and aging and time. (Perhaps the funniest passage of the book when the nineteenth century arrives and IMMEDIATELY all Orlando's poetry drafts turn into sentimental Victorian drivel and she just CAN'T STOP.)
But it's hard to fit all that in a ninety-minute show, so Sarah Ruhl's production picks about 2.5 things to focus on -- mostly gender and aging with a little bit of time -- and does those things extremely well and wittily. The play takes advantage of Woolf's clever narration, with a cast composed of Orlando + five chorus members (including one who doubles as a cello accompanist) who all (including Orlando) alternate between narrating the story in-character, narrating the story out-of-character, and delivering dialogue. It's very snappy and very funny and keeps a lot of Woolf's best narrative lines; the price for this is it cuts all the parts in which Orlando interacts with other authors and the changing English literary scene, and I did miss that. (It also cuts most of what happens in Constantinople and the subsequent lawsuit involving Orlando's hypothetical children, which is all highly Orientalist and which I did NOT miss; if you're going to cut anything that's good stuff to cut.)
But it also makes some very good additions -- a puppet-show version of Othello; a quick reprise by Queen Elizabeth; a double-casting of Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine and Orlando's oak tree; an ending that takes Orlando all the way up to a present moment that's an actual present moment, with a Nokia cell phone ringtone played beautifully on cello, so overall it may balance out. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable way to experience the story and a solid production; I would recommend.
(I was going to comment that it's interesting that Orlando seems to be usually played in visual productions by a cis female actress, but actually I guess Tilda Swinton may be nonbinary? So this comment may not be relevant.)
-- and, backtracking, it seems like Orlando is one of the books we read for book club last year that I never got around to writing up, though on further investigation I did apparently do so in 2008. This is interesting to recall now, as the only thing I remembered from that read ten years ago was the visual image of the carnival on the frozen Elizabethan Thames.
Anyway! Orlando is a book in which our noble protagonist starts out as an Elizabethan teenaged boy, spends four hundred years attempting to write a great poem about an oak tree, and ends up a 36-year-old woman in the 1920s. Ten years ago I seem to have been mostly struck by the gender aspects of the book, which are certainly notable, but it's also got a lot to say about writing and aging and time. (Perhaps the funniest passage of the book when the nineteenth century arrives and IMMEDIATELY all Orlando's poetry drafts turn into sentimental Victorian drivel and she just CAN'T STOP.)
But it's hard to fit all that in a ninety-minute show, so Sarah Ruhl's production picks about 2.5 things to focus on -- mostly gender and aging with a little bit of time -- and does those things extremely well and wittily. The play takes advantage of Woolf's clever narration, with a cast composed of Orlando + five chorus members (including one who doubles as a cello accompanist) who all (including Orlando) alternate between narrating the story in-character, narrating the story out-of-character, and delivering dialogue. It's very snappy and very funny and keeps a lot of Woolf's best narrative lines; the price for this is it cuts all the parts in which Orlando interacts with other authors and the changing English literary scene, and I did miss that. (It also cuts most of what happens in Constantinople and the subsequent lawsuit involving Orlando's hypothetical children, which is all highly Orientalist and which I did NOT miss; if you're going to cut anything that's good stuff to cut.)
But it also makes some very good additions -- a puppet-show version of Othello; a quick reprise by Queen Elizabeth; a double-casting of Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine and Orlando's oak tree; an ending that takes Orlando all the way up to a present moment that's an actual present moment, with a Nokia cell phone ringtone played beautifully on cello, so overall it may balance out. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable way to experience the story and a solid production; I would recommend.
(I was going to comment that it's interesting that Orlando seems to be usually played in visual productions by a cis female actress, but actually I guess Tilda Swinton may be nonbinary? So this comment may not be relevant.)
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Date: 2018-03-03 03:20 am (UTC)(I realize that this is framed as agreeing with you but about something you never actually said, but it relates to your last comment about casting. Anyway.)
(Also, I've gotta say, I would love love love to see a production of Orlando where the main character was played by a trans woman actress.)
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Date: 2018-03-03 03:30 am (UTC)(I WOULD ALSO LOVE TO SEE THAT.)
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Date: 2018-03-03 03:29 pm (UTC)I would accept that, yeah, definitely. (Sidebar: I recall the Archduke/chess's gender being somewhat more complicated and vague in the books; the play was very definite about that, though I'm not certain if that was the adaptation or the production's choice.)
With the same caveat--although I'm puzzling out also whether I care about the actors' personal gender identities, vs what kinds of gender expression are visible onstage (in a non-comedic fashion). In many contexts I dislike the phrase "gender non-conforming" but I think in a theatrical context it works, because in theater actors' visible aspects of gender presentation are an aspect of the performance. Especially in a production of Orlando! And they could have done a lot more with that.
(But also, fidelity in representation, and I'm 110% sure there are plenty of non-cis actors in the Boston area who could use the work.)
...insert complicated thoughts here also about how Orlando and Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine if I'm remembering correctly are Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf analogs, so really, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine should probably be played by a female (or non-binary or trans guy? oh, Virginia Woolf) actor.
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Date: 2018-03-03 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 04:04 am (UTC)