Theatre director Michael Grandage: ‘I think we are just catching up with Virginia Woolf’

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Turning 30 is a landmark in any young man’s life but for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, his 31st year proves seismic. He wakes one day from a protracted slumber and rises, naked, from his bed. Whereupon it becomes clear that, as Woolf writes, in one of the most astonishing sentences in English literature, “he was a woman”.

And that’s not the half of it. By the time of this change, which takes place in 17th-century Constantinople, Orlando has already lived for about a century and will live for another three, arriving in 1928 — the year in which Woolf’s novel was published — at the mere age of 36 but with the accumulated experience of some 400 years of history and lovers both male and female.

That Woolf wrote Orlando almost a hundred years ago is nothing short of amazing, says theatre director Michael Grandage, who is about to open a new West End stage adaptation of this groundbreaking classic with Emma Corrin (best known for playing Diana, Princess of Wales, in Netflix’s The Crown) in the lead.

“[Woolf] was a voice definitely ahead of her time,” he says, when we meet at the end of a day’s rehearsals at London’s Union Chapel. “How extraordinary to come up with the line ‘he was a woman’ nearly a century ago. I think we are just catching up with her.”

Grandage, who ran the Donmar Warehouse from 2002 to 2012 and whose company MGC was last in the West End with The Lieutenant of Inishmore starring Aidan Turner, is far from the first to be inspired by Woolf’s classic. There have been many adaptations, including the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton. But this staging of Orlando arrives at the Garrick Theatre at a time when gender fluidity is a particularly hot topic. “What I would love this piece to do is try and help that debate,” says Grandage.

Black and white photograph of Vita Sackville West in a wide brimmed hat staring past the camera
Vita Sackville-West, with whom Virginia Woolf had an affair and is the inspiration for ‘Orlando’ © Lenare/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Black and white photo of Virginia Woolf outside sitting in a wicker chair
Virginia Woolf in 1926 © Corbis via Getty Images

Key to that task is fun. Woolf’s novel — capriciously titled a “biography” — bowls through the centuries with dazzling jeu d’esprit, defying genre and convention, celebrating the potential in non-conformity. Inspired by Woolf’s love affair with Vita Sackville-West, the story has a joyousness to it — a paean to creative and personal freedom. Famous characters make cameo appearances: as a young nobleman, Orlando hobnobs with Elizabeth I and spots Shakespeare sitting at the servants’ dinner table. He falls passionately in love with a Russian princess, owns vast property and sizeable wealth and is sent as an ambassador to Constantinople.

Yet becoming a woman, Orlando realises with dismay, means it is no longer possible to swear oaths, run a man through with a sword, lead an army or wear a coronet. “All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour tea and ask my lords how they like it,” she laments.

The skirts get on her nerves, but much more serious is the discovery that, in a patriarchal society, she’s now, legally, a second-class citizen. The stately home Orlando owned as a man she now has to fight for, although in essence she remains the same person. “The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity,” writes Woolf of her protagonist.

“One genius thing Woolf does is that when Orlando becomes a woman she doesn’t lose her male memory,” says Grandage. “She becomes a woman remembering everything she’s done as a man: how she felt as a man, how she behaved as a man and what she got just for being a man . . . Woolf managed to be fantastically political without being political on the nose. So she leaves you with huge debate but she leaves you with that after the most fantastical story. It radiates goodwill, lifeforce, joy and, yes, horniness.”

Woolf’s novel may be playful, but it is also challenging: it’s densely descriptive, low on dialogue and jumps through time periods. Much of its appeal lies in its stylistic panache. How can you replicate that on stage?

“I don’t want people who love this novel to come along and go, ‘oh, it’s not the novel’,” says Grandage. “It’s about keeping the essence of the novel in the theatre piece.”

Photographic portrait of Michael Grandage sitting on a stool in a studio, laughing
Director Michael Grandage ran the Donmar Warehouse from 2002 to 2012 © Marc Brenner

To that end, Grandage is working with a new script by Neil Bartlett that brings Woolf’s time-travelling protagonist right up to the present day, channels the joy, wit and elasticity of the original and is mischievously theatrical. Bartlett has, in his own words, “shamelessly pillaged” period literature for his dialogue — be that Shakespearean sonnet, Jacobean tragedy, Restoration comedy or the film Some Like It Hot.

The story will unfold on a near empty stage, with nine versions of Virginia Woolf — each representing a different facet of the author — slipping in and out of costume to play all the other characters. The idea, Grandage explains, is to expand on the novel’s central idea of transformation and mutability and to translate its creative scope into theatrical language.

“There’s transformation in many scenes, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, everything about it is utterly theatrical,” he says. “And having an empty stage helps your storytelling technique.

Grandage returns to the stage fresh from filming My Policeman, also starring Emma Corrin. In a sense, that delicate tale of a closeted gay policeman falling in love in 1950s Brighton is the inverse of Orlando, demonstrating the damage done when people cannot freely express who they are. As a gay man, Grandage feels there is currently a danger of hard-won rights and freedoms being unpicked. He cites the overturning of Roe vs Wade as an example.

“This is the first time in my adult life where all the advances different communities have made feel fragile and not to be taken for granted,” he says. “I hope we never ever have to return to a society where you can’t be who you are.”

That’s one reason his theatre company has retained its practice of selling 25 per cent of tickets at £10, despite the effect of rising prices on the costs of staging a show. “We know that most of those tickets go to 16-26-year-olds,” he says, adding that the West End needs to attract the broadest possible demographic.

“At the centre of Orlando are two huge existential questions: who am I and who do I love? And during the play you go from that 15-year-old boy in Elizabethan England asking that question to a 36-year-old woman in 2022 going, ‘Yes, I feel I can now somehow take these questions on.’ To go through that wonderful arc after everything we have all gone through on the planet seems to be another reason to do this play.”

To February 25, 2023, michaelgrandagecompany.com

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