Virginia Woolf’s Orlando playing at the Garrick Theatre London

There’s never been a better time for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to be performed and there’s never been a better person than Emma Corrin to execute it, writes Molly Pavord.

Orlando is a powerful and playful imagining of complete and utter freedom. Freedom to travel, freedom to cross gender lines, freedom to love and even freedom to travel time.

This is the essence that Michael Grandage brings to life in his reimagining of Neil Bartlett’s play at the Garrick Theatre.

Particularly apt is his casting of activist Emma Corrin who has been at the forefront of non-binary discussions in the media after calling for gender-neutrality at the Olivier awards.

Woolf’s novel is a product of her very real and forbidden love story with Vita Sackville-West, whom she imagines as a man born in Elizabethan England, who lives across four decades and turns into a woman.

Published in 1928, Woolf’s Orlando was nearly a century before it’s time in forecasting its themes of gender fluidity.

The way in which director Michael Grandage ramps up the raunchy element of the story reflects just how radical and dangerous the book was in her day.

Bartlett’s play highlights the novel’s experimentalism by placing Woolf, or nine Woolfs, right at the centre of the plot in a directorial role, playing with and altering the narrative as it unfolds before their eyes.

The multiple costume changes that Corrin is subject to throughout the duration of the play are symbolic of her ever-changing identity.

However throughout these changes Mr Grandage reminds us that Orlando remains the same, she is not bound to superficial gender constructs.

Tickets: https://www.michaelgrandagecompany.com/productions/theatre/orlando

Picture: Emma Corrin as Orlando Picture: Marc Brenner