An ode to language. To beauty. To the imagination. To the senses. To life.
Can you live for over three-hundred years and in that time change sex! Can you fall asleep as a man and wake up a woman! Can you be the Queen of England’s lover, a diplomat in Turkey and a gypsy? Yes. All this happens to Orlando, the protagonist of the novel of the same name by the English writer Virginia Woolf.
Orlando (1929) is an adventurous journey through the history and the cultures of Europe, and also one of the gems of twentieth-century literature. Katelijne Damen plays Orlando, Guy Cassiers directs. An ode to language. To beauty. To the imagination. To the senses. To life.
Selected for the Dutch Theatre Festival 2013.
But in this Orlando something of a miracle takes place! And that miracle is Katelijne Damen. Not only did she adapt the surprisingly light text into a lively, meandering and at times turbulent stage monologue, but she also plays both the biographer and the biographer’s subject Orlando. And she does it inimitably. Like Maria Kraakman in the Oostpool version, Damen deserves a Theo d'Or.
"He, Guy Cassiers, has pulled it off again. Or rather: she, Katelijne Damen, has. Both wanted to make an ode to the imagination. To language. To beauty. To the senses. To life. They succeeded, and how!"
"Cassiers’ style is now so much his own that you might imagine his plays would no longer be able to surprise us. But he manages to do so again, together with Katelijne Damen."
"With actor Katelijne Damen’s primeval force, her clear, lyrical treatment of Virginia Woolf’s text and the aesthetic visual language of Guy Cassiers and his image and sound designers, the members of Toneelhuis have added another gem to their oeuvre."
director
- Guy Cassiers
translation
- Gerardine Franken
dramaturgy
- Erwin Jans
adaptation
- Katelijne Damen
performance
- Katelijne Damen
set design
- Guy Cassiers
light design
- Giacomo Gorini
video design
- Frederik Jassogne
sound design
- Diederik De Cock
artistic collaborator
- Luc De Wit
costume design
- Katelijne Damen
production
- Toneelhuis
- Toneelhuis
