Orlando
Garrick Theatre, London, until February 25
“For a lady, you were quite a gentleman,” Emma Corrin, playing the title role in Orlando, is informed. At a time when the whole issue of gender has become so furiously contentious that most people daren’t utter a word about it, the paradox at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s novel is gleefully explored in Michael Grandage’s production.
It is funny, seditious, intelligent, courageous and beautiful, but, perhaps best of all, it demonstrates that Corrin – Diana in the last series of The Crown – really is a proper stage actor.
Corrin, who uses non-binary pronouns, showed enormous promise with a debut in Anna X at the Harold Pinter Theatre, and here it is triumphantly realised. Like all the greatest actors – and Laurence Olivier comes to mind immediately in this regard – they flirt unashamedly with the female as well as the male members of the audience.
In Corrin’s first scene, masculine perceptions of their radiant beauty, charisma and seductiveness are confounded as they casually disrobe
and reveal a convincing prosthetic penis. It is the fact Corrin plays the
scene so matter-of-factly that makes it so stunning.
In Grandage’s assured and stylish production, the one male is Richard Cant playing a succession of sex-starved grand dames – and the costume supervisor, Yvonne Milnes, kits them all out in some spectacular dresses that reflect the various reigns the ageless and androgynous Orlando lives through over four centuries.
Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West was the inspiration for Orlando and she intended the book to be witty as well as outrageous. Neil Bartlett admirably communicates both these qualities in his adaptation.
There is a delightful comic turn from Deborah Findlay in what amounts to a narrator role – she’s careful to add “and everyone” when she addresses the audience as “ladies and gentlemen” – and Lucy Briers makes a spectacular entrance as Queen Elizabeth I.
Grandage has been preoccupied with making films such as Genius and My Policeman in recent years and his big musical, Frozen, but it’s a joy to see
him back directing a serious, challenging play. There is no greater theatre director currently living.
