Orlando

“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

Have you ever lived outside yourself? Have you ever dreamed of escaping your identity, or yearned to leave behind those definitions handed down to you: loud or quiet, male or female, straight, gay, working/middle/upper class?

Lucy Roslyn’s new play is the story of a person looking for escape, a person desperate to leave behind the identitarian bullshit of 2019.

In 1928 Virginia Woolf imagined her own freedom through the character of Orlando. Heartbroken by her affair with Vita Sackville-West, Woolf created a young boy born in Elizabethan England, who lives and loves, writes and rewrites through four hundred years, ending her days as a woman in the twentieth century.

Woolf’s novel strains at the boundaries of identity: are we any one thing? Or are our selves ‘stacked like dinner plates’, one on top of the other?

Written and performed by Lucy Roslyn (The State vs John Hayes, Showmanship, Goody) and directed by Josh Roche, winner of the JMK Award 2017 (My Name is Rachel Corrie, Plastic, This Must Be The Place), Orlando is brought to you by the creative team behind Kenneth Emson’s Plastic at the Old Red Lion.