Tag Archives: Sarah Ruhl

Orlando

Orlando

★★★★

Jermyn Street Theatre

Orlando

Orlando

Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed – 4th May 2022

★★★★

 

“The fine cast of five deliver Ruhl’s honed script with gorgeous vivacity, tongues in cheeks and glints in eyes”

 

It is easy to fall into a debate about whether Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” would have the same impact as it did nearly a century ago if she had written it in today’s climate. But we’re going to avoid that digression here. Clearly, it’s influence and relevance is as powerful now as it ever was, not just in its treatment of the subject of gender, but as a satiric look at history, literature and convention. Published in 1928, it was one of Woolf’s best-selling books. And the most enjoyable. Woolf declared while writing it that “my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas”. The novel’s popularity and longevity were practically guaranteed before she even put pen to paper.

And it continues. Both ‘high art’ and gossipy at the same time it has been adapted for theatre and film, most notably Sally Potter’s 1992 release starring Tilda Swinton. Continuing the trend is Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Choosing not to compete with the big budgets, this is a playful and low-key reimagining that focuses on the humour and the subtle mischief; without trying to shoe-horn the original story into a contemporary setting.

We begin in the reign of Elizabeth I. Orlando (Taylor McClaine) is born as a male nobleman with poetic ambitions. With dubious motives, the Virgin Queen adopts him as a pageboy, and a plaything, until her death when Orlando promptly falls for Sasha, an excitable and unreliable Russian princess (a wonderfully skittish but underused Skye Hallam). Orlando’s heart is broken by Sasha, so he briefly returns to his abandoned poetry before heading for Constantinople. It is here that Orlando inexplicably falls asleep for days and awakens to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman. Completely accepting of the change, she is the same person, same personality, same intellect, and while she stays biologically female her amorous inclinations swing both ways throughout the ensuing centuries.

There is a lot to cram into an hour and a half of stage time. The fine cast of five deliver Ruhl’s honed script with gorgeous vivacity, tongues in cheeks and glints in eyes. There is an old-fashioned quality that simultaneously has a timeless feel. We are in the past and the present. They are like a bygone travelling troupe of players who have pitched up in Piccadilly. McClaine, in the titular role, is a delight to watch throughout. Star quality is etched across their performance; a performance imbued with a deadpan humour that matches the ease with which the character switches roles, genders and sensibilities.

Tigger Blaize, Rosalind Lailey and Stanton Wright play the numerous other roles and, comprising a chorus, the trio narrate the story with clarity and precise timing, overlapping the narrative and weaving threads of comedy and insight into the dramatic backdrop. At one point, following the throwaway line “… then he was she…”, we almost expect the chorus to launch into Lou Reed’s “Hey, babe, take a Walk on the Wild Side”.

All in all, though, the production is not quite a walk on the wild side. It still remains relatively safe, veering towards the shock-free traditional. It seems that the memo about safety didn’t reach designer Emily Stuart, whose costumes are daring, colourful and brilliant – a highlight of the show – which add to the sense of fun and irreverence.

This adaptation teases out the theatricality of Woolf’s novel. If the innate radicalism doesn’t quite cut through, the playfulness, the wit and the satirical undertows certainly do. “Orlando” was ahead of its time a century ago. Today it is certainly very much of the time. Make time to see it.

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Steve Gregson

 


Orlando

Jermyn Street Theatre until 28th May

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
This Beautiful Future | ★★★ | August 2021
Footfalls and Rockaby | ★★★★★ | November 2021
The Tempest | ★★★ | November 2021

 

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Dear Elizabeth

Dear Elizabeth
★★

Gate Theatre

Dear Elizabeth

Dear Elizabeth

Gate Theatre

Reviewed – 23rd January 2019

★★

 

“the cold reading approach precludes us form caring about the characters and is an unfortunate roadblock before we even start on their journey”

 

The playwright Sarah Ruhl came across the lives of American poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, reading a book of letters between them. She found there was “something deeply compelling about the way these two lives intersected”. The letters, which span three decades from 1947 to 1977, tell the story of their relationship that defies easy definition. It wasn’t quite a friendship, nor a love affair: they seldom met, and both lived independent lives: Bishop was a lesbian and Lowell was with a variety of women. But they put their entire lives into language for the other. This intangible, intense connection forms the basis of Ruhl’s “Dear Elizabeth” which dramatises the beauty wrought from simple correspondence.

First produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 and later in New York, director Ellen McDougall has added an extra dimension by casting a different pair of actors each night and having them perform unprepared. It’s a fascinating idea, one that can potentially give a real edge to the drama, yet it is easy to go over that edge and into the pitfalls that come with this experimental approach.

The actors (on the evening of this review; Phoebe Fox and Nina Bowers) discover the story of the person they are representing as they go along. This can occasionally be awkward but gives an authentic messiness to the performances which reflects the intended ‘life-as-it-is-lived’ intention of the piece. Fox and Bowers quickly fall into time with the rhythm of the text and shed their self-consciousness. However, the cold reading approach precludes us form caring about the characters and is an unfortunate roadblock before we even start on their journey. There is a flicker of redemption towards the end when Fox relates a desperately moving account of Elizabeth Bishop’s lover’s, Lota de Maceda Soares, suicide; but it is all a bit too late.

Surreal moments promise to break up the fairly static narrative; during which, in parlour game fashion, the actors react to stage directions they are given. But these theatrical devices fail to get to the heart of the matter. Bishop’s alcoholism is clumsily touched upon by the appearance of a bottle of rubbing alcohol and Lowell’s chronic depression earmarked by a pillbox of tablets spilled onto the table.

In an interview Ruhl professes to asking herself “why am I so captivated” by the poets’ lives. A rhetorical question with an obvious answer: the letters themselves are an intimately honest documentation of two bruised souls opening up to each other. In McDougall’s hands though, Ruhl might be prompted to ask the same question again.

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

 

 

Dear Elizabeth

Gate Theatre until 9th February

 

 

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