Orlando
Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf
Adapted by Darryl Pinckney and Robert Wilson
Music by Hans Peter Kuhn
German version: Premiered on November 21, 1989 at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, Germany. Performed by Jutta Lampe.
French version: Premiered on May 9, 1993 at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Switzerland. Performed by Isabelle Huppert.
English version: Premiered on August 13, 1996 at the Edinburgh Festival, Scotland. Performed by Miranda Richardson.
Chinese version: Premiered on February 21, 2009 at the National Theater, Taipei, Taiwan. Performed by Hai-Ming Wei.
Orlando is a monologue in three parts, based on the famous novel by Virginia Woolf. Darryl Pinckney’s adaptation of the text spans over 300 years of English history: in the beginning of Part I, Orlando the boy is a page at the Royal Court. His first words in the play are: “I was alone.” The teenage boy becomes a favorite of the elderly Queen Elizabeth I. After Elizabeth’s death, there is an incredible freeze during which all of London lives on the ice, and Orlando falls in love with a Russian princess who then betrays him and departs.
In Part II, Orlando is sent by King Charles as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople. He sleeps through the revolution that topples the British rule, and when he awakes, he finds himself metamorphosed into a woman.
In Part III, Lady Orlando escapes Constantinople and marries a sea captain. She lives through the prudish Victorian age and, at the end, finds herself a grown woman in the Twentieth Century—the present. She concludes: “The cold breeze of the present brushes my face with its little breath of fear. But I am alone.”
Orlando Bed
“Orlando Bed”, 1992