Lucy Roslyn is the author and performer of the solo play Orlando, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel (“the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”).
At the outset of Orlando, playwright-performer Lucy Roslyn says she discovered Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel (also titled Orlando) at a “jumble sale” when she was 12. Roslyn, from England’s West Midlands, explains that a jumble sale is what Americans call a yard sale. She also mentions that hers is a Coventry accent and that Woolf’s Orlando, in successive editions, has been a treasured companion since she bought that flea-market paperback years ago.
Roslyn recounts the events of Woolf’s phantasmagoric novel, explaining why the book and its protagonist have been important to her since she was 12.
Woolf’s novel, dedicated to her former lover Vita Sackville-West, is a pastiche of pretentious 19th-century biographies (the sort that historian Lytton Strachey, Woolf’s lifelong friend, rebelled against in his historical writing). The title character is an idiosyncratic aristocrat—in Woolf’s words, a “mixture of brown earth and blue blood”—whose lineage includes Norman patricians and ancestors of less lofty Kent and Sussex stock. Born in Elizabethan England and a favorite of the Queen herself, Orlando has survived hundreds of years without becoming old.
Sent by King Charles II to Constantinople as Ambassador to the Court of Sultan Mehmed IV, he serves with distinction until a curious occurrence, which Woolf portrays by narrative tour de force. After a spirited nocturnal frolic with a woman of pleasure, Orlando sinks into a trance, returning to consciousness a week later—female in body and mind but retaining the memories of his/her previous experience. “The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” (Yes, writing 95 years ago, Woolf refers to Orlando with the non-gendered third-person-plural pronoun in a way that presages recent grammatical disputes.)
Orlando, which Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicholson calls “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature,” has been dramatized before, most notably in Sally Potter’s lavish 1993 film and, during the just-ended theater season, as a sparely-staged play by Neil Bartlett in London’s West End. Roslyn approaches the material from a completely different angle, using Woolf’s book as a thematic touchstone rather than the core of her narrative, pairing reflections on Woolf’s phantasmagoria with the chronicle of a thwarted love affair.
“Roslyn [uses Virginia] Woolf’s book as a thematic touchstone rather than the core of her narrative.”
Roslyn meets Bea at a hotel. “There was Bea in the bar,” she recalls. ”She’s forgotten her toothpaste. Later on that night I knock on her door with a tube of Colgate. And we’re standing in the doorway, and we’re smiling at each other. Then we’re in the room and … [s]he asks me to stay, and … I fell in love with Bea.”
Where is this taking place? What are the women’s respective reasons for being at the hotel? The playwright ignores those questions, focusing instead on the chemistry between the two. Bea marvels that she “can be a different person” with the other woman. For Roslyn, encountering Bea is like “see[ing] light hitting a prism.”
Meeting secretly at the hotel on numerous occasions, the women “live like the Little Prince, on a planet of [their] own,” lounging together, picnicking on the floor, free of prejudice and labels. Roslyn is prepared to give her all to the relationship and go public with the news. Bea, who’s married with children, equivocates. When Bea resolves to stick with her husband instead of exploring the possibilities of that enticingly “different” persona, Roslyn grieves.
In an imagined conversation, Roslyn tells her lover, “I see you and I see light hitting a prism.” Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Considering the brevity of this intriguing solo play, Rosyln grapples with a sizable array of themes, including mutability, the nature of memory, the mercurial quality of identity, and the human need for what she calls “communion.” Is the play derived from Roslyn’s own memories; or is it about a fictional character, also from Coventry, and that character’s recollection of romantic disappointment? Interesting questions, but irrelevant. What’s important is the drama’s insight and verisimilitude and the impact of the performance. In this review, the narrator/protagonist (identified as “Person” in the script) is referred to as “Roslyn” without the intention of labeling the play as strictly autobiographical.
On stage, Roslyn is an engaging presence, evoking both lovers’ insecurities with pathos yet confidently commanding the stage alone for an uninterrupted hour. Directed by Josh Roche, the play moves swiftly, with Roslyn calibrating tempo and dynamics, like a virtuoso with a sonata, according to the mood and emotion of each scene.
Amid the ruins of the demolished love affair, Roslyn looks to Orlando as a model of self-conscious development. He/she has survived centuries by changing radically again and again. Roslyn faults Bea for not transforming herself to achieve the positive “difference” she perceived when they were together. For her own part, Roslyn is surmounting grief through personal reconfiguration, actorly “communion” with her audience and, like Orlando at the end of the novel, stepping forcefully into the future.
The Jessie Anand Productions/BoonDog Theatre presentation of Orlando runs at 59E59 Theatres (59 E. 59th St.) through June 11. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit 59e59.org.
Playwright: Lucy Roslyn
Direction: Josh Roche
Sets and Costumes: Sophie Thomas
Lighting: Peter Small
Sound: Kieran Lucas
