Sydney Reviews

Orlando starts well with celestial bodies on roller skates orbiting an Elizabethan era spruiker standing on the thick ice of a frozen Thames, but it’s not too long before the wheels fall off. Full credit to Roller Skating Consultant P. Tucker Worley and the actors for the moon and starlight expression.

Adapted from the novel by Virginia Woolf by Carissa Licciardello and Elsie Yager and directed by Licciardello, Orlando is a generation spanning, gender bending odyssey of a person named Orlando, androgynous adventurer of the space/time continuum, bequeathed an immortality and lands and titles by the Virgin Queen, presented as vaudeville.

It worries about what an individual human person is and the society into which that person is born, stubborn social mores promoting gender stereotypes and inequality, progress postponed even by proponents of the scientific profession. But there’s an enervation rather than an exuberance, even with its breaks into cabaret.

This production is not so much a play as an essay in non binary advancement over five hundred years, some visually impressive, some laboured like the interminable vignettes that end the play. The quick change by the actors is admirable but it derails the narrative delaying the arrival time of the quip, poignant or not.

A septet ensemble comprising Janet Anderson, Nyx Calder, Emily Havea, Amber Mcmahon, Nic Prior, Shannen Alyce Quan & Zarif – four of whom play the title character in progressive metamorphosis – tackle the transgender hyperbole with dedication, but there is a tendency for the narrative to drag.

David Fleischer set design is simple burnished metal flats with Nick Schlieper’s lighting design doing all the heavy lifting, well and truly coming into its own in the Dickensian bleak, bible black, foreboding and funereal Victorian section of the piece and the tube station finale with its occipital lobe stressing strobe. It’s a device over played and over stayed.

Costume Designer Ella Butler’s wardrobe, assisted by Hailley Hunt, is perhaps the star of the show, a highlight with beautiful texture in textiles and contrasts, the triumph of this costume drama.