Orlando - STC

Overview

I'm not sure if 'show, don't tell' is as cardinal a rule for theatre as it is for film, but the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Orlando, directed by Sarah Goodes, is an excellent example of why it should be. Snippets from Virginia Woolf's source text which could have made some incredible images if further explored  — the great frost for example, in which a young woman from Norwich was "seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder" — are tossed away in narration as instead excessive use is made, yet again, of the stage's revolve.

Tone is also a major problem. In the first five minutes, the source, a satirical, poetic, mysterious exploration of the biographical form and a fascinating subject, is frog-marched to the pantomime gallows and hung high. It spasms occasionally, Woolf's text struggling to escape its current form.

Orlando is a boy — "for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it" — and an aspiring Elizabethan poet who catches the Queen's eye. After a series of emotional misadventures, he finds himself dealt an unusual hand; approaching middle age, he transforms into a woman — and an immortal one at that. The narrative sees her navigate her way through the centuries to the 'present moment' of the 1920s.

The cast is made up of a four-man chorus/ensemble (Matthew Backer, John Gaden, Garth Holcombe and Anthony Taufa), Sasha — an enigmatic Russian love interest played by Luisa Hastings Edge — and Jacqueline McKenzie as Orlando. They all shine during particular moments — although for a script which sets about complicating notions of gender, there are a disturbing number of Widow Twankeys that appear throughout proceedings. That said, once the laughter subsided, Gaden's Elizabeth was an interesting portrait of fading power and Backer's Marmaduke Shelmerdine was understated but intriguing in his defiance — hand in hand with Orlando — of the traditional parameters of gender.

The audience on opening night were no doubt engaged, laughing throughout and returning the cast to the stage for two encores. But with lines like "This must be middle age. I pick up a handbag and think of a dolphin frozen beneath the ocean", I can’t help but feel that there was a richer vein of strangeness and complexity to the piece that was flogged into submission by men in silly wigs.