Theatre
Carissa Licciardello and Elsie Yager’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for Belvoir is most rewarding where it takes the most risk. By Patrick Lau.
Belvoir’s adaptation of Orlando
Orlando, even more than the rest of Virginia Woolf’s work, is a hot yoga workout. It stretches out, flows from form to form, sweats out the muck to find what’s at the spiritual centre. Belvoir’s Orlando, adapted by Carissa Licciardello and Elsie Yager and directed by Licciardello, slaps some Lululemons on that 1928 novel. It’s inspired by a classic, but it’s also fabulous.
Time and form – and the confinement, exploration and recursion within them – are curious things in both the original and the adaptation. The titular Orlando is a young aristocrat in Elizabethan England, a novus homo favoured by the queen and thrilled with the possibilities of the career and the life ahead of him. He’s falling in love for the first time with an exotic Russian princess and working on a book of poetry.
Orlando is what Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop”: a being who enters new iterations of himself, always evolving but always ending up at the same beginning. Orlando lives forever and switches genders. It’s not clear why and it’s not important.
Woolf’s novel is usually described as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, written in an atmosphere that constrained the forms their affection could explicitly adopt. While Orlando does flip gender, the novel is not so much interested in a particular manifestation of sexuality or sex as it is in the essential core of a person, how personhood is manifested or constrained by its overlaid forms, and how that dynamic has changed (or not) over time.
The romance is in Orlando’s spirit of curiosity and adventure: the love of self and love for the world that are so attractive in the character.
Complex themes, and a freewheeling narrative, might present difficulties in translating to stage. Orlando enters on rollerskates. Licciardello begins her play on the frozen Thames, where the Elizabethan court has transplanted itself for a season of The Tudors on Ice.
Courtiers glide around Gloriana like planets in an orrery. In the show’s stand-out performance, Amber McMahon plays the Virgin Queen as sinister and nurturing, petty and majestic, all while immobilised in a hoop dress that seems to be the size of the solar system. Her red hair lights up a monochrome, snow-blown set.
David Fleischer’s set design and Nick Schlieper’s lighting are minimalist and effective. Cold chrome walls enclose the stage, both entrapping the cast and opening up an infinity mirror. At times the walls reflect hellish flames or clouds on the horizon: their blankness contains multitudes.
Ella Butler’s costumes head in the other direction, towards excess. Queen Elizabeth’s contraption-dress, more engineered than tailored, requires its own wheels. Some members of the cast undertake dozens of costume changes throughout the night. It’s a big ask, and Butler delivers.
From Elizabeth the production moves on to a Restoration panto, risqué but good-natured in a kind of Carry On Transitioning way. Orlando is a woman now and the humour is as broad as England is merry. Many an ankle is coquettishly flashed, to the consternation of the bewigged and powdered fancy boys.
The charm of the performances here is in their enthusiasm rather than their deftness or control. Imagine your uncle on stage in a frock, corpsing his way through an amateur society production of H.M.S. Pinafore. The ham is at maximum, and the bigness and silliness is the point of it. The scene culminates with a vampish cabaret singer straddling a piano, belting out a show tune with enormous gusto.
In this arena Orlando learns the power and pleasure and constraints of being a woman. She can command attention with a strategically deployed handkerchief or the threat of a swoon, but her right to opinion is abrogated. Women should be seen and not heard, a spectacle without respect. Like the dandies in their pastel booties, Orlando possesses delicacy but lacks their agency.
We pass through Victorian London – you can tell because it’s very foggy – where Orlando is self-identifying as a woman, albeit a very Edward Scissorhands-coded one. Marriage is now for women a funereal necessity: British law is insufficient to deal with such absurdities as a 300-year-old aristocrat or a woman who would like to
own property.
A risk in adapting Orlando is cleaving too closely to Sally Potter’s 1992 film, which starred a charismatically androgynous Tilda Swinton. Licciardello’s stage work is particularly filmic, and there are hints here of Potter’s movie, as well as aesthetic influences from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Tim Burton. But this production, while drawing from a wide net, takes itself in new directions.
In the climax, which departs from the source text, the play really becomes itself, for better or worse. Here we meet Orlando a century after the publication of Orlando and ask how things are getting on. The chrome walls open up and reconfigure, placing Orlando in a Tube station on the strange loop of the Circle Line. Tiny scenelets flash by between trains as commuters comment on news or minutiae.
Sylvia Plath saw the role offered to a woman as “the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes … day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue”. Those bright white boxes thunder past here, but they’re not prison cells: they each contain little gifts. Licciardello’s Orlando refuses to be stuck in a box, contained in one day, or to be confined to a single sense of self. Although there are pleasures to be found in each of those things, they are not enough.
The idea of cutting oneself off from the possibility of self-actualisation, of possible futures, by locking in to a linear course – or, worse, being shackled into one – is rejected by this play. What Licciardello and Yager reveal is that it’s in the nature of Woolf’s Orlando to evolve beyond the novel. The character is too wilful, too mutable, to remain satisfied with what’s already been said.
This production is not perfect. Some bits drag, but some of the decisions demonstrate an admirable confidence, pushing the edge of what the director and performers seem capable of, rather than sticking with what’s comfortable and easy. Whether they’re successful or not, those risky decisions are the most rewarding.
During the Elizabethan sequence, one or two of the actors come close to a tumble on their rollerskates. But they catch themselves, wobble for a bit and recover. Orlando is a production, and a director, keeping themselves moving, trying new things: iterating, iterating, iterating.
Orlando is playing at Belvoir St Theatre until September 28.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Crystal queer".
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