Theatre review: Orlando
Published Date: 03 October 2010
By JOYCE MCMILLAN
http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment/Theatre-review-Orlando.6561514.jpON ITS MISSION to merge the artforms of music and theatre Cathie Boyd's Glasgow-based Cryptic company has sometimes travelled a rocky road. With this exquisite 70-minute version of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, though, the company's work reaches a heady new pinnacle of achievement, and comes close to fulfilling Cryptic's early description of itself as a company that wants to "ravish the senses" of the audience.
Orlando is itself an intensely sensual and erotic novel, plunging through four centuries alongside its magnificent androgynous hero/heroine, who begins his story as a beautiful boy in Elizabethan England, and ends it as a free woman of the early 20th century, still searching for love, still ultimately alone. Cathie Boyd's stage version has three vital elements, beginning with the entwined music and text created by composers Craig Armstrong and Antye Greie (known as AGF) and writer Darryl Pinckney; the music is lush, clever and beautiful, the combination of Armstrong's melodic and cultural strength, and Greie's delicately voiced electronic inventiveness working like a dream.
