Review - Orlando - Soulpepper Theatre Company, Toronto

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by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Katrina Darychuk

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

July 11-29, 2018

“Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in

every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been”

If Virginia Woolf’s surrealistic 1928 novel Orlando is to be adapted to the stage, it cries out for a production that is as inventive as the novel. This is not what the novel receives in Sarah Ruhl’s rather pedestrian 2003 adaptation nor in Soulpepper’s production directed by Katrina Darychuk, who is currently a member of the Soulpepper Academy. Darychuk’s direction is efficient but in no way remarkable. Why the play was not assigned to an experienced director with a greater knowledge of physical theatre is a mystery.

For those who don’t know the novel, Orlando is the fictional biography of someone who is born in England during the reign Queen Elizabeth I and is still alive, having hardly aged when the novel ends in the present, i.e. in 1928. The most important event in Orlando’s life takes place in when Orlando is 30 and has been appointed by King Charles II as an ambassador to Constantinople. There he falls asleep for almost a week and upon waking discovers that he has become a woman. As the narrator explains, ““Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been”. Woolf’s novel is one of the most amusing and profound tales about gender fluidity ever written.

As a man, Orlando’s love interests has been entire focussed on women, with the Russian princess Sasha as the great love of his life who, however, was faithless to him. As a woman, Orlando entertains interest in both sexes but eventually falls in love with the sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, whose sex is never made clear.

Orlando is a short novel of less than 150 pages. All Ruhl has done is to omit various subplots – such as those satirizing literature and dealing with Orlando’s life among the Gypsies – and focus on events related to Orlando and his/her love life. Ruhl has divided the narration among a chorus of three, whom she allows to be as many as eight. Characters narrate the sections that pertain directly to them. Thus Orlando even speaks of his/herself in the third person. Ruhl permits the director to cast actors of any sex in any role, including that of Orlando.

Darychuk has cast women as Orlando (Sarah Afful) and Sasha (Maev Beaty) and three men as the chorus – John Jarvis, Craig Lauzon and Alex McCooeye. The first two of the chorus, costume designer Gillian Gallow has dressed as men with jackets and pants. The third she has given a jacket and an ankle-length skirt. As a boy and a man, Gallow has dressed Orlando in Elizabethan style with hose, knee-length breeches, a jerkin and a ruff. When Orlando awakes as woman she is in full 18th-century attire with a panniers under her full-length gown and sporting a tall wig au parterre galant. Gallow gives Orlando further gorgeous costumes for the 19th century and for the 20th.

Lorenzo Savoini’s set is a white rectangle with the audience on three sides. The fourth side features a wall with a door surrounded by elaborate moulding that is strangely hoisted three feet from meeting the floor. This oddity is the only visual aspect of the design that remotely suggests the surrealism of the novel.

As a director Darychuk merely has the chorus stand about and narrate and sometimes supply Orlando with a prop. To capture the magical world of the novel scene after scene calls out for the use of physical theatre. The work would be perfect for a group like Theatre Smith-Gilmour, who lent such theatricality to their adaptation of Faulker’s novel As I Lay Dying. Darychuk, in contrast, comes up with nothing. During the Great Frost of 1608 when Orland and Sasha go skating on the Thames, all we get is the sound of skates while the couple simple walk across the stage. In the 20th century Orlando sees an automobile for the first time, but the cast weakly mime riding in a car with modern suspension, not the bumpy ride of a Model T.

Since the director’s is unable to come up with theatricality to match the invention of Woolf’s novel, it falls entirely to the acting of the cast to carry the story. Sarah Afful is wonderful as Orlando, particularly when he is a boy and young man. She has just the voice and body language for the character at this stage and conveys all the joy and pain of his first great love. When Orlando awakes to find he is a woman, she is very funny in demonstrating her awkwardness in her new clothing and in conforming to the modes of behaviour expected of a woman. Strangely, Afful never fully allows Orlando to settle into the conventional voice and body language of a woman. It’s hard to know whether it is Afful or the director who has taken the narrator’s statement that “Orlando remained precisely as he had been” too literally.

Maev Beaty plays the duplicity of Sasha so well that we ourselves are deceived. Beaty has Sasha speak to Orlando with such convincing passion that it seems almost impossible that Sasha should be insincere. Beaty gives Sasha such presence that it is too bad the character has so little stage time.

The male chorus speak very well together as narrators even though Darychuk mostly has them remain static when they speak. All three also play various characters in the story. As such we see them first as three women at Elizabeth’s court competing for Orlando’s attention.

Of the three Alex McCooeye is the most effective as his main character, the Archduchess Harriet, whose desire for Orlando is so ardent and whose attentions are so strong that Orlando has to leave the country. McCooeye injects so much passion into Harriet that we can see its danger as an obsession.

Craig Lauzon contrasts with his colleagues in portraying the sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine as a calm person, satisfied with life and therefore attractive to the the harried Orlando. He could stand, however, to imbue the captain with a greater sense of desire. John Jarvis gives a very peculiar performance as his main character, Queen Elizabeth I. The sashaying walk Jarvis uses and the drawling speech hardly fit with anyone’s image of the strict virgin queen.

The problem with many stage adaptions of novels is that they are not fully re-imagined a theatre pieces. That is certainly the case with Ruhl’s Orlando, which is not far removed form a staged reading of the novel. Darychuk’s lack of imagination compounds the problem by missing out on numerous ways to lend the work greater theatricality. Do go for the performances of Afful and Beaty and McCooeye and Gallow’s costumes, but you may well find that reading the novel will give as much or more pleasure than seeing this uninventive stage adaptation.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

2018-07-13

Orlando