Orlando (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

From a teenage encounter with Elizabeth I, through infatuations, voyages and even a change of gender, Orlando lives out five centuries of life and love before they finally find the courage to truly be themselves. Neil Bartlett's sparkling adaptation of Virginia Woolf's famous fantasy finds powerful contemporary relevance in her vision of equal rights to love for bodies of every kind – and brings it to life on the stage with a kaleidoscope of theatrical styles, overseen by the haunting figure of Woolf herself. It premiered at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End in November 2022, in a production directed by Michael Grandage and starring Emma Corrin in the title role. Written for a diverse ensemble of nine or more actors, this adaptation will appeal to any theatre or company looking to entertain their audiences with a bold new take on this iconic tale of love and transformation.

Leseprobe

Virginia Woolf

ORLANDO

adapted for the stage by

Neil Bartlett

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction by Neil Bartlett

Original Production Details Epigraph

Orlando

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

IntroductionNeil Bartlett

AdaptingOrlando

‘It has to be half laughing, half serious: with great splashes of exaggeration.’

Virginia Woolf in her diary on 20 December 1927, talking about her work in progress on the manuscript of Orlando

Woolf’s giddy crossbreed of a novel – half fantasy, half polemic – plays deliberate havoc with just about every convention of the genre it parodies. As this most fantastic of biographies leapfrogs its way through several centuries of English history, it surrounds its subject with a kaleidoscopic cast of debutantes, cross-dressers, seducers, sailors, sex workers, royalty and servants. Then – famously – Woolf chooses to hinge her whole wild goose chase of a narrative on just one elegantly incendiary sentence: ‘He was a woman.’ How can you possibly put such a determinedly and fabulously more-than-real narrative on stage?

Well…

Time

At the end of the whirling fugue of recapitulation with which it concludes, Virginia Woolf records the exact moment at which Orlando passed into the hands of her future audience. She does this with a sentence noting the exact time at which the book came off the press, at ‘midnight, Thursday the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Eight’. In other words, she reveals at the very last (and exact) minute that Orlando has lived on to be her original readers’ contemporary. It was this very last firework of a sentence that first inspired me to start work on this adaptation – and also gave me the basic idea of how I was going to do it. Essentially, that final sentence offered me the idea of having Woolf herself on stage, and of her being both in and out of time. Because the story ends so decisively in its original present moment, I knew at once that I wanted to make a staging that would end in our equivalent, thus enabling its creator to travel not only past that publishing deadline of 1928, but also past the moment of her own death in 1941. Once I had hit on the idea of her being with us in the theatre, I soon began to wonder what it might be like for the author not just to watch but also to interact with how her unruly and rule-rewriting creation might breathe and speak in the air of our own gender-restless, gender-curious and maybe even gender-revolutionary century.

Eventually, I decided to make my own ending as radically simple and specific as hers; although the book ends on a hundred-year-old midnight, this adaptation takes the liberty of ending it in the real place and real time that any performance of it is given. And on the way to that ending – inspired by Woolf’s improvisatory, in-the-moment and ever-restless prose – I have used every trick in my personal theatrical book to keep proceedings in the present tense of live performance.

That is why, I suppose, I have suggested that this version of the story both starts and ends with a moment when the company looks directly at the audience, here and now.

Words

Orlando famously travels through time, and the second decision I took when starting work on this script was that each separate century of her/his life should be refracted through the verbal style of that epoch; that we needed, as the years pass (and melt, and leap) somehow to get not just an evolving history of the body but also a history of language. In order to achieve that effect, I have shamelessly pillaged my library.

When we first meet him (for instance), Orlando is not an only a recognisably bratty and hormonally supercharged public-schoolboy, he is also an Elizabethan. To express himself, therefore, I have him improvise a teenager’s bedroom mash-up of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, one which recasts fragments of Woolf’s opening pages within the versification of the peerless original; when he first falls in love, he does so via the immortal truisms of Romeo’s first sight of Juliet. On her entrance, meanwhile, the ageing Queen Elizabeth I reworks the riper, spikier and more archaic blank verse of the revenant Ghost from Hamlet. She then goes on to channel both Cleopatra and Olivia in the moments when she, like them, is brutally rebuffed by the object of her desires.

When – a monarch later – Orlando is almost forced into an arranged marriage, the competing candidates for his hand play out a sketch of the parallel and suitably queasy scene from Shakespeare’s Pericles. After that, as our hero journeys from the bright confidence of youth to the darker testing grounds of middle age, Shakespeare gives way to Webster (his gamey prose, as well as his nihilist verse). Leaping forwards to the London of the Restoration, the now-female Orlando’s eighteenth-century suitors quote Dryden, Etherege and Congreve at her. When the misogyny of literary London drives her close to a fan-tearing breakdown, she herself adds in a particularly unpleasant dash of Alexander Pope to provide the straw that breaks the camel’s back of her patience.

Meanwhile – in keeping with my determination to keep things constantly ‘present’ – I have, of course, felt as free to play as provocatively with my literary history as Woolf did with hers. The Lady Orlando’s Restoration monologue may be coloured and structured by authentic Restoration models, but the scene with the Archduke Harry that immediately follows it mixes in quotes from Kander and Ebb (and Some Like It Hot), as well as from Sheridan – not out of perversity, but because I wanted the audience to recognise that this specific kind of closeted and misogynist upper-class homosexual is still very much alive and kicking in our midst (Woolf, by the way, based this character on a real-life contemporary of her own, Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood).

Half a century later, when Orlando experiments with passing as a man on the streets of Soho, Mrs Grimsditch’s advice to her on the fine art of lesbian cross-dressing is taken directly from Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West’s diary for 1920. Meanwhile, the pick-up scene in Leicester Square is nicked verbatim from Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore, a marvellous Drury Lane she-tragedy from 1714, which in my opinion deserves to be revived far more often than it is. The nineteenth century – the century in which Woolf lived the first eighteen years of her life, we should always remember – features the surreal trinity of Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde and Alfred, Lord Tennyson – plus (of course) Emily Brontë’s immortal Catherine Earnshaw, in the operatic ‘mad scene’ where Orlando restyles herself as a swooning heroine from Donizetti, and again when she pledges herself to her final partner, the Heathcliff-like Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. My Marmaduke’s use of the word ‘husband’ is taken as much from my own contemporary (queer) experience of the word as it is from 1928; after that, as Orlando enters our present, her final monologue is Woolf and nothing but. This is not because I think nothing has changed since 1928, but because in the luminous closing moments of her story, I experience Woolf quite simply – and powerfully – as my contemporary.

Beside all the material lifted word for word from Orlando itself, I very much hope that devoted Woolfians will take pleasure in spotting the places where I’ve reworked material from A Room of One’s Own and The Common Reader. Both books were written close to Orlando, and they share much of its urgent, heartfelt and distinctively feminist energy. All three books, I think, are key points in Woolf’s career-long project of trying to work out how one might use writing to turn the world upside down, and thus to make it a better place for all of us to live in.

Characters

To be clear, despite the length of the cast list, this adaptation of Woolf’s story only really has three characters: Orlando, her/his housekeeper Mrs Grimsditch – and Virginia Woolf herself.

Orlando

The title character of the story is written to be played by a single but chameleon performer. My intention is that we see Orlando take a journey – through an emotional and sexual lifetime, through history, and through the many identities which the differing epochs of that history sometimes impose on her/him, and which she/he sometimes creates for her/himself against all odds. However winding the road, we should always feel that the destination as well as the substance of this journey is a sense of self.

The other quality I think this performer must manifest is courage. At a time when Victorian orthodoxies still maintained their stranglehold on at least the public institutions of her country, Woolf very publicly dedicated Orlando to Vita Sackville-West, the glamorous aristocrat with whom she had just enjoyed (and endured) a tempestuous affair. A month after the book’s publication, Woolf controversially appeared as a expert witness for the defence at the trial of Radclyffe Hall, a fellow best-selling author whose novel The Well of Loneliness had dared to depict lesbian love as a fact, rather than as a fantasy, and who had been prosecuted for obscenity as a result. Woolf had also just delivered – in person – the radically feminist lectures which she later used as the basis for A Room of One’s Own. For me, these are just three examples of how this extraordinary woman not only worked tirelessly in order to imagine new futures, but courageously threw her own body into that fight.

Mrs G

Orlando is accompanied throughout her/his journey by a character whom I have christened Mrs Grimsditch. In the original book, Orlando’s personal servants across the centuries are named as not just this Mrs Grimsditch, but also as a Mrs Twitchett, a Mrs Stewkley, a Mrs Field, a Miss Robinson, a Mrs Nelly and Nurse Carpenter. However, these women’s names are then more or less all that Woolf ever tells us about them. Servants seem to have been her blind spot – in Life as well as Art – and my garrulous, show-running Mrs G is a conscious act of reparation for all that anonymity.

At the start of the story, she seems to be Orlando’s housekeeper, and possibly (I think) his ex-nurse – both senior and long-term positions in the kind of English stately pile to which her now-teenaged charge has been born heir. However, it soon becomes clear that she is also a hard-working, time-travelling amalgam of every single dresser and wardrobe mistress that I have ever had the privilege of working with.

If Orlando her/himself is permanently wondering where or who she/he is, Mrs G takes a much more practical attitude to questions of identity. If she’s not nipping on stage to sort out her beloved boy or girl’s latest emotional insecurity, then she’s rummaging in a costume skip to anticipate the story’s next dramatic change of era, all the while offering helpful narrative prompts to anyone who needs them. In other words, keeping a performance going is simply what she does, whether that performance be theatrical or more a matter of real life. If asked why this character of mine seems to be so at home with the conventions of the theatre, I would have to answer that it is because Mrs G lives there. And that I hope she always will.

It’s important for the story to notice that like all mothers – or in this case, ‘mothers’ – Mrs G knows that, in the end, her child must make her own way in the world.

A small technical note on the lines belonging to this character. You will notice that in the script I have left Mrs G’s choice of expletives up to the performer concerned. She certainly isn’t backwards in coming forwards (as my grandmother would have said) – but whether she is Ealing Comedy or Ken Loach when it comes to swearing – well, that I couldn’t say.

Virginia

The trick of the third character in my script is very simple: in contrast to the other two characters, she is intended to be played not by one performer but by many.

The script’s opening image of a scribbling woman who immediately refracts into several identical-yet-different selves was amongst the first that appeared in my workbook. I think (in hindsight) that this must have been my unconscious reaction to the delicious way Woolf has of being able to walk right round her subject – the way in which she always manages to show us Orlando’s life quite literally from several sides at once. It seemed quite logical, therefore, to have several differing versions of herself on stage, not just witnessing the story, but constantly altering our perspective or point of view. As with any chorus worthy of the name, it is important that these women are all individuals, and that because they embody individual parts of the same mind, they are quite capable of contradicting each other.

I also think that lurking behind my idea of a chorus of Virginias is the fact that the woman who Virginia Woolf knew herself to be during the hectic and infatuated months in which she wrote Orlando was herself multiple. At the very least, she was (for instance) at once immensely educated, passionately love-struck, sexually naive and helplessly randy; she was confused, decisive, bewildered and impulsive. She was both in love with a woman and heterosexually married; now in her mid-forties, she was both Bohemian by choice and still a privileged Victorian by upbringing; in her letters, she portrays herself during those months as besotted, furious, powerful, powerless – and (just like Orlando) profoundly lonely.