Interview: Neil Bartlett on the Writing Process, Gender Identity and Adapting ORLANDO for the Stage

Orlando is Virginia Woolf's visionary creation, leading the reader through four centuries of gender-defining history.

Adapted by Neil Bartlett, starring Golden Globe winner Emma Corrin and directed by Tony and Olivier winner Michael Grandage, the early-awaited stage version of Orlando is about to start previews.

BroadwayWorld caught up with Neil ahead of opening night on 5 December to talk about the writing process, gender identity and the magic of language.

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Your love for Oscar Wilde is well documented, but were you a fan of Virginia Woolf before working on this adaptation?

I've actually had a copy of Orlando on my shelves since I was a teenager - but it wasn't until I spent time living on the English coast down in Sussex that Woolf really caught fire in my imagination. My husband and I used to walk our dog along the river at Rodmell, where she lived and, in fact, died. Re-reading the book on the riverbank one day, I understood that Orlando isn't really a "fantasy" at all , but a blow-by-blow account of one brave and brilliant woman's profound attempt to understand the mechanics of her own heart.

Tell us about how you came to work on adapting Orlando?

I am always wondering where the next good idea is going to come from - and it was a second walk - also one by a river - that made me actually go to my desk and start work on the first draft. I now live in London, and I was walking by the Thames at Blackfriars, which is where Woolf gives Orlando his/her London residence. I thought, wait a minute, the river is still flowing past Blackfriars, same as it ever did - what if the river of time meant that Orlando lived on into the present day...?

The story spans over 300 years, featuring a frozen river, a carnival and a house with 365 rooms. What were the challenges of adapting those fantastical elements for the stage?

Simple; I've done what Woolf herself does; relied on the magic of language. It's the words that do the work. In particular, I've made the words travel through theatrical history - so in Shakespeare's time, Woolf's prose is filtered through Shakespeare's blank verse - sharp-eared punters will spot where the teenaged Orlando channels Romeo, for instance, and Elizabeth I, the ghost from Hamlet. Then, as the years pass, we move via John Webster to the Restoration theatre with its fans and fops and Congreve and Dryden - and then on into a particularly surreal version of the nineteenth century which mashes up Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Emily Bronte. By the end, we are back with pure Woolf. Because she really is our contemporary, not just in her sexual politics, but in the sheer daring of her prose.

The novel plays with what is fact and what is imagination. What was your vision of how the play would be staged?

I've put it on a bare stage, and had Virginia Woolf herself conjuring all the places and people. What that back-from-the-dead storytelling does, of course, is to play with time - which is something that theatre is really good at. Right from the start, Woolf insists that we are both with her live, in the present tense, and also travelling with her through the years. So even the most apparently impossible things - what Woolf in the book calls Impossible Facts - become real. One moment, a performer is playing a Elizabeth I; a change of language, a change of lights, and she is playing a sailor, or a nineteenth century spinster. One moment, Orlando is a man; the next, she is a woman - because she says so. In the theatre, the imagined is necessarily embodied - and that is what makes it the perfect place to tell this particular story.

Gender difference and sexual identity are huge themes in the book, with the suggestion that concepts of gender are a social construct. How did you approach this, considering the heightened awareness surrounding gender at the moment?

Woolf very specifically gives room in her story to both diverse sexualities and diverse presentations - and I have reflected that by writing a script that is best served by having an inclusive company. I wanted the audience to literally be in the room with that diversity. Sometimes, Woolf shows us that "gender" is indeed a social construct - that it all comes down to our ridiculous assumptions about the difference in value between someone who wears trousers and someone who wears skirts. At other times, she shows us something even wilder and stranger, which is that our own sense of our own "gender" is really about a profoundly individual sense of who we love and how we love them. I think it is this richness - this all-roundness, if you like - of Woolf's vision that makes this such a great story to be telling right now.

Did you have Emma Corrin in mind to play Orlando before or during the adaptation?

The first draft was written with just me and Virginia in my head; then, when Emma came on board on the basis of that draft, things exploded. I had their voice and physicality to write to - and anything became possible.

How involved have you been in rehearsals?

I was there for the whole of the first week - answering the actor's questions, fine-tuning a few lines after I'd heard them spoken, offering up some backstory about what Orlando means to me personally. Then Michael cracked on without me. We had done a lot work together discussing the whys and wherefores of the script as it developed from draft to rehearsal script, so I knew that he and I were on the same page; however, once he was on the floor with the actors, it needed to be his vision that was paramount. He can call me when he needs to - but otherwise, its over to him. For me, if someone else directs the first production of a piece of my work, then I have to trust them completely. And in this case, I do. It's that simple!

In the book, while looking in a mirror, Orlando says "Different sex. Same person." Where do you think Orlando sits as a landmark in accepting trans identities?

As a matter of historical fact, Woolf wouldn't (and couldn't, in 1928) have been aware of trans identities exactly as we now understand them a hundred years later. What she was intensely aware of - as a woman who just fallen in love with another woman, and as a feminist - was of the struggles and pleasures of gender-nonconformity. And we know this included knowing especially and personally about women who identified and presented as "masculine" as and when they chose. So...yes, Orlando is a wonderfully prescient milestone in our journey towards a full and creative understanding of ALL our possibilities - and because of that, it is therefore most definitely a milestone on our journey towards not just "accepting" but actively celebrating the identities and lives and loves of all our trans friends, colleagues, family members and partners.

Vita Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicholson, wrote that Orlando was Woolf's "love letter" to his mother. Is that how you see it?

I think at certain points the story is very much about Vita - I think the character of Marmaduke, for instance, is Vita, which is why I was very keen for Marmaduke to be played by a woman. But I didn't want to stage a roman à clef; I think that the important thing about Nicholson's comment - which is entirely right, by the way, and the book is surely one of the best and also scariest love letters ever written ! The important word in his comment is love. I think love is Woolf's subject - and her method.

The book has all the hallmarks of infatuation - horniness; giddiness; the sense that anything is possible; and especially the sense that the world can and indeed has been turned upside down in an instant, simply by virtue of one's having fallen in love with a person about whom everything is right - but about whom so much of the world and indeed one's habitual self is going to say everything is wrong. So the book is really a self portrait I think; Portrait of the Artist as A Bewildered Middle-Aged Woman. That said, I do think Vita's sheer glamour is very important to the vision of the book - the simple but profound idea that love brings riches, not hardship. Riches of personal beauty, riches of abundant and transforming sexuality, riches of courage - not to mention sheer material riches, and all the freedoms they gave Vita.

Woolf challenged stereotypes on so many levels in the book. What do you think the novel has to say to society today?

Discover your inner Orlando! Open the doors to change! Dress up and non-conform! Seriously, I think it challenges to take the work of this great feminist to heart, and really learn from her quite astonishingly prescient and challenging vision.

Woolf was all too aware that her sex hindered her standing in society. Your recent adaptation of Jeykll and Hyde puts a woman at the centre of a man's world. Do you think female stories and perspectives are still being missed in theatre today?

Of course they are. The wheel is turning - but still too slowly for my liking - that's why I put my shoulder to it whenever I can. I'm very proud of the fact that this show will get Woolf's radical feminist name up in lights for a new generation - and especially proud of the fact that our re-telling of this great woman's work is being created by an alliance of cis-gender, trans, non-binary, straight, bi and even good old-fashioned queer artists.

You are a novelist, as well as performer. How do you think this has informed your work on adapting the novel?

Being a novelist has kept me alert to the power of the actual sentences- to the amazing individuality of Woolf's prose, and how well it can work on stage. Meanwhile, being a Working Theatre director and sometime performer makes me keep an eye on practicalities. It's no use sticking an amazing transformation into the script if you haven't got a good sense of its timing, for instance. And if you're writing for an ensemble as big as this one, then you'd be a fool not to give everyone a chance to shine. Maybe an adapter who'd never been up there themselves would miss that trick.

Orlando is at the Garrick Theatre from 26 November - 25 February 2023

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