Watching Emma Corrin on stage is like seeing someone move through a different element. At first I thought the actor was like a flame. Then I realised that though I had seen flaring, guttering and vanishing, the comparison was partly critical slippage. I had remembered them (Corrin’s preferred pronoun) as The Crown’s Diana, as a candle in the wind. Their really distinctive quality is more fundamental. They make the extraordinary seem utterly natural. They ground the bizarre without domesticating it.
Corrin’s gifts are ideal for incarnating Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling, gender-swapping aristo, whose journey from the age of Gloriana to the 20th century is a guide to why it is hard to be sentient and anti-feminist. The actor’s own recent identification as non-binary gives edge and urgency to Orlando’s illuminated miasma.
In Michael Grandage’s vivid production, Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation – funny, frisky, over-busy, intelligent – presses home the fact that Woolf’s novel was partly autobiographical: written when she was married to Leonard Woolf but had fallen for Vita Sackville-West, and published only a year before A Room of One’s Own. The multiple selves of Orlando, lover of men and women, are echoed in a multitude of Woolfs: nine in all – including one black, one male – who act as a Greek chorus. They come on in limp brown cardies and specs, landing just the right side of irony in depicting a Lady Writer. They show us the moment when women are first allowed on stage (“shouting at people in the evening – is that a proper job?”); they sketch Victorian lives, taking teacups out of Gladstone bags while talking about mothering 15 children. They look forward to new divorce laws.
Interleaved with Woolf’s words are allusions to The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Some Like It Hot (“I’m a woman – no one’s perfect”) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Also guiding the action is an actor who can make a twitch of the mouth or a swivel of the eyes ricochet across an auditorium. Deborah Findlay fine-tunes a part that mixes panto and 21st-century gender alertness, quickly correcting her “boys and girls” and “ladies and gents” with “sorry – everyone”. In a show that teases Woolf’s sensitive snobberies – “as the lady novelist said to the incidental working-class character” – Findlay dusts rather than nutcrackers her speech with cockney. Though named after Orlando’s housekeeper (Mrs Grimsditch), she is shrewdly given the role of wardrobe mistress.
In delivering what now seems a prophetic account of how we learn to be women or blokes, Woolf spills out marvellous descriptions of how clothes not only reflect but determine how we behave. Her book is full of fabric (when the novelist Angela Carter embarked on an operatic version, she set a scene in Marshall & Snelgrove’s bedlinen department). Peter McKintosh’s crucial costumes are gorgeous: white stockings, knickerbockers, ruffs, pantaloons, corsets, blue and silver brocade, dove-grey doublet. All set for change at the drop of a cocked hat, the rustle of a Turkish robe. McKintosh also designs – less fluidly – the set.
It is wonderful to see Corrin alighting like thistledown on both the seriousness and the humour of all this. With each new incarnation they subtly remake the disposition of their body and voice. They can look, with ruffles and tapering limbs, as if they have been peeled off an Elizabethan miniature. They can sound like a coltish young toff. Corrin is by turns earnest and nonchalant. They move to their own rhythm – and make it feel like the heartbeat of the audience.
Twenty years ago, Rufus Norris directed his own version of Sleeping Beauty at the Young Vic: it starred a punk bad fairy, gave ogres a big shout-out and vibrated with energy. You can see that vigour glimmering occasionally in his Covid-delayed production of Hex, a larger version of the story written by Tanya Ronder, with music by Jim Fortune. It is there in Lisa Lambe’s belting, furious, tousled fairy; in Victoria Hamilton-Barritt’s magisterially gloomy ogress. Katrina Lindsay’s design floats the image of a beautiful palace, like an Advent calendar window, high above the stage (though why is it also hung with spinning wheels when this is a spindle-free account?). Lindsay and Norris are jointly credited with the concept of the show.
Yet these are glimmers only. For much of the time, watching Hex is like fighting your way through a grimly enchanted forest without a trail of breadcrumbs to guide you. It’s hard to follow what’s going on: bad spell! Huge twists! Jumps of time! Mummy the ogress trying to eat princess’s babies! Commands to be true to yourself! Commands to change! Ronder’s script jabs at stereotypes, but the plot flip-flops over when confronted by the trad family values presented by marriage and mums, and by the prince’s dubious wake-up kiss. As do the lyrics, written by Norris: it says much about these that a perky duet between Sleeping B and her beau – made up almost entirely of “Hi” and “Hello” – is a musical highlight.
For much of the time, Fortune’s music lies over the action like a damp magic cloak. There’s a bit of ska, some feeble hip-hop and several big ballads – bawlads – put across with conviction but not growing with necessity out of what has come before (though sometimes laboriously recapitulating the action), not lighting up a character, not pushing on to what follows. A dance for thorns – “bish bash bosh” – is choreographed with panto boisterousness, though without the smut that would make it funny: these chaps are, when all’s said and done, all pricks.
It looks sumptuous but thinks timid. Which matters. This is one of the National’s big shows – and comes from a director capable of illuminating the stage: Norris created in Alecky Blythe’s London Road one of the boldest and most reverberating of musicals. How extraordinary that the adaptation of Orlando, once considered an abstruse modernist novel, should seize the moment infinitely more successfully.
Star ratings (out of five)
Orlando ★★★★
Hex ★★
