Not for Magdalen College the easy pickings of conventional summer garden theatre. They got that out of their system last year with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now they are delving into more experimental waters with a revival of Neil Bartlett’s eye-poppingly original 2022 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-and-gender-bending novel, Orlando. The result is a production which, despite never being conceived as an open-air experience, finds new life and new meanings amongst the irises, statuary and roving cats of the President’s Garden.
On the night I was there, Neil Bartlett, the playwright, was present. An alumnus of Magdalen, he has not returned since graduating in 1979. Back then he was a rebellious voice in the all-male quads and corridors of the college, awash with Etonians in black tie, mutely sharing their secrets of what they got up to in the dorms back at school. Neil wore bondage gear and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘YES, FAIRIES ARE REAL’ on the back. To him, and to other brave outcasts of that era, we owe a lot of the inclusivity that characterises the Oxford of today.
Orlando is a fantastic, picaresque tale of a character who, after being born in the 16th century, becomes apparently immortal, and passes through the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian eras, changing both clothes and gender, as time and the world evolve around them. In this adaptation, and in Magdalen Players’ staging, it is a witty, delicate celebration of diversity.
Even before the play starts, we are invited to enter the seductively puzzling world of Orlando. The audience strolls through an adjoining clearing where characters are positioned like Victorian automata, all reading, writing and musing over their notebooks, captured in the act of creating the play we are about to see. They are in fact all Virginia Woolf, and it’s worth knowing beforehand that every character in this play except the central one is Woolf, playing different parts in Orlando’s journey through time and self-discovery.
In the original London production, the multiple presences of Woolf were made crystal clear in the opening scene, with a diverse cast coming on one at a time, all wearing identical costumes, and sitting down to write. Here, that unifying feature is less obvious. But that is my one quibble in an otherwise brilliantly original, intellectually stimulating, and refreshingly bawdy production.
There is a deliberate artificiality to Bartlett’s writing: the lines feel half-real and rhythmic, borrowing phrases and memories from other plays, poems and films. The actors capture that unreality with gusto, creating a series of vignettes which both engage and confuse at the same time. It’s like a complex, geometric sculpture: not all of it is tediously explicable, but from every side you look, it yields a new, beautiful and thrilling perspective.
In the central role of Orlando him-then-her-then-themselves is Wally McCabe. McCabe builds on their previous outing as Dionysus in The Bacchae with a performance of devastating confidence and sumptuous ease. There’s a feeling that they were born to play this role (and indeed at the Q&A afterwards revealed that Orlando is their favourite novel). Equally at home in any and all genders, McCabe is the vessel of this show’s strange and beautiful music. At the interval, while the rest of the cast disappeared indoors, and the audience stroked the President’s cat, McCabe stood, staring fixedly outwards from the centre of the stage, swathed in a cape: a lone, sustained musical note connecting the two halves of the play. The commitment, ferocity – and lightness – of that performance was unforgettable.
At the end of the play, as it washes up on the uncertain shore of 1927, the chorus-like character of Mrs Grimsditch (an irresistibly cheeky Rijul Jain) speculates what the world will hold for people like Orlando a hundred years hence – those who stand outside the straitened, straight-gendered, straight-laced world left behind by the Victorians. Well, we’re here. And despite the unspeakable problems we face, at least in this garden, and with these young people, we have an answer of hope and joy.
None of the play’s myriad literary references were lost on this cast, and every half-quotation plucked from theatrical history was delivered with a wink. There was a sense that the words themselves move through time like Orlando, some scenes switching across centuries from Richard Sheridan (‘The pineapple of perfection’) to Billy Wilder (‘Nobody’s perfect’) in the swish of a skirt.
And on the subject of skirts, the costumes in this show are to die and be reborn for. Rather than grab bits and pieces from dressing-up boxes, Costume Designer Biba Cope-Brown, along with visionary directors Phoenix Barnett and Raphael da Silva, have wisely spent money on a trip to the Royal Shakespeare Company's wardrobe archive, and come back with a collection of frocks and uniforms that make the characters snap into three-dimensional life. Budgets for plays are not huge, so kudos should also go to Producer Eve Wilsmore for the acuity to know exactly where to put funds for maximum effect.
One of my earliest memories of Neil Bartlett is seeing him perform as Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Pegasus Theatre here in Oxford. With full handlebar moustache and deep, booming voice, he was, and remains, the greatest Cleopatra I’ve ever seen (his sonorous ‘Ohhhh Antony!’ was my first conscious exposure to the power of gay theatre). So it was particularly touching to see Orlando themself speaking Cleopatra’s lines in this production (‘Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it.’) Tying those two performances together across a gulf of forty years, with Bartlett sitting next to me, hands clasped in quiet appreciation, became symbolic of the play itself: future and past both being present, here and now. I don’t often quote T.S. Eliot these days, what with everything, but his lines popped unbidden into my head while watching these fragile paradoxes unfurl before me: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
Bartlett is one of the most important queer theatre-makers of our day. But watching this show brought to mind yet another Oxford alum who has played a massive role in that vital field: Russell T. Davies. Dr Who is in many ways a sci-fi version of Orlando: a traveller in time who never gets older, who feels separate from the rest of society, and who changes their identity every few years – including, most recently, their gender and race. Under Davies’s influence, The Doctor has become an agent for diverse representation – without ever letting go of their sonic screwdriver. With Orlando, Woolf, Bartlett and Magdalen Players have crowned the first true Time Lord.