Orlando @ The Traverse

I have just returned from a sensuous multi-media journey, gently rocked by the subconscious sceptre of Virginia Woolf's quill. Orlando, her sixth major novel, is a poetic historical biography, also described as “ the longest and most charming love letter in literature”, written for her lover Vita Sackville-West. It has been mise en scène by Glaswegian performance company Cryptic and premiered at the Traverse in Edinburgh, 30 September, 2010.

The seventy minute staging of Darryl Pinckney's adaptation of the novel is a delicate invitation to a subtle poetic feast. Onstage we see one actress, one musician/composer and visual effects projected onto the set, composed of seven muslin panels acting as screens, which come cleverly undone and roll back when released. The simplicity of the set is the perfect backdrop to a score of ambient music, sensually and softly spoken words, and a minimalist Elizabethan costume. All the elements work together harmoniously to present Woolf's dense text relating the story of a young man who begins life during the reign of Elizabeth I and continues to live through the subsequent centuries to the present day, undergoing a gender change along the way.

In Orlando's journey of self-discovery and quest for love, we are drawn into the eternal tapestry of time and live the centuries with him as he metamorphoses from man to woman in an ever-flowing stream of consciousness presented in beautiful images and sounds. This is a stunning collaboration between live performance, electronic music, and visual art. It is abstract and poetic, a living canvas, if you will.