Thoughts and Critiques

Near the beginning of Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the housekeeper Mrs. Grimsditch (a tartly funny Deborah Findlay) addresses the audience, “Ladies and gentlemen—sorry, everyone—”

And so begins a witty celebration of gender fluidity and the exploration of self.

For those unfamiliar with the book, Orlando is a pseudo-biography recounting the adventures of a young nobleman born during the reign of Elizabeth I, who somehow lives on to the present day. And who wakes up one morning in the late 17^th century to find himself changed into a woman.

Woolf dedicated the book to Vita Sackville-West (“the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” writes Sackville-West’s son), and Orlando the character is transparently based on Woolf’s bisexual lover.

The prescience of this 1928 novel is astonishing. How is it that Woolf, born in the Victorian era, could play so freely with gender identity? How, as Alison Bechdel has put it, was she able to “[invent] her way into the future?”

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Bardolph, hanged for stealing from a church, slowly rocks in his noose as the lights come up for intermission. This image haunts me, summing up as it does Holly Race Roughan’s brutal take on Henry V.

And what’s more exciting than to see a familiar play in an entirely new way? Roughan’s production at Shakespeare’s Globe takes a familiar text and makes it utterly unfamiliar and unsettling.

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