Guy Cassiers / Toneelhuis
| Director: | Guy Cassiers |
| Interpreted by: | Katelijne Damen |
| Costume design: | Katelijne Damen |
| Adaptation: | Katelijne Damen |
| Set design: | Guy Cassiers |
| Translation: | Gerardine Franken |
| Dramaturgy: | Erwin Jans |
| Artistic collaboration: | Luc De Wit |
| Audiovisual design: | Frederik Jassogne (Hangaar |
| Lighting design: | Giacomo Gorini |
| Sound design: | Diederik De Cock |
| Producer: | Toneelhuis |
“An almost magical atmosphere and a heady linguistic virtuosity make this theatrical production a true gem”.Cutting Edge
Imagine that you live for 400 years and change sex over the course of centuries. One day you go to sleep as a man and you wake up the next as a woman. No, this is not the bizarre plot of a science fiction story. It’s what happens to Orlando, the main character in Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. Orlando (1928) is one of the cornerstones of twentieth century literature. An ode to the imagination. To language. To beauty. To the senses. To life. In February 2017, the XXXIV Festival de Otoño a Primavera will host the Madrid premiere of a play that director Guy Cassiers, drawing inspiration from the novel, brings to the stage.
Guy Cassiers blends two characteristics that distinguish the great stage directors of the XXI century: the adaptation of literary texts and using audiovisual language as an integrated part of his dramas. As with Joseph Conrad’s monumental novel Heart of Darkness, for example, and again with Orlando, Cassiers takes on the challenge with Katelijne Damen, one of his most reliable actors after over a decade of collaboration. Damen’s involvement goes beyond the interpretation of this monumental monologue about Woolf’s tremendous character, as she is also credited for the play’s adaptation and costume design.
“This play is a celebration of life through Woolf’s fantastic language. The novel is a book within a book which contains a book. Through Orlando you see things through the eyes of the writer; her game of attraction, seduction and broadening of the senses”, says Cassiers. Meanwhile, Damen acts as guide and narrator through Orlando’s life journey, an immortal character who is neither man nor woman nor belongs to any nationality.
Damen and Cassiers illustrate the character’s sex change with subtle costume details. The piece employs a complex system of video projections as a scenic resource, with everything that is projected on the screen played out live on the stage. One could say that it is a painting that captures the different moments of the character's life. The play takes an almost four-century historical journey that spans the Elizabethan and Victorian periods to Europe in the late 1920s. The audiovisual language is paired with a minimalist sound track that serves to define different periods and situations. Cassiers places four cameras on the ceiling above the stage in a play on mirrors, creating images within images and developing a language as brutal as it is poetic and a story that is actually a celebration of life. Orlando premiered at the Dutch Theatre Festival in 2013.