Suranne’s a powerhouse of charm

Orlando, Royal Exchange, Manchester, to March 22
THE combination of Oldham’s brightest current star and one of the Exchange’s most promising up-and-coming directors takes a stab at one of literature’s least-likely candidates for theatre. And almost pulls it off.

The trouble with Virginia Woolf’s free-ranging, dialogue-light and description-heavy stories is that when it comes to adapting them, there isn’t a lot of the essence of drama — namely dialogue, action and emotional change.

Orlando is one of Woolf’s most accessible stories: the 16-year-old boy falls through history, adding only 20 years and a change of gender to his frame in almost 500 years.

From the court of Elizabeth I to the present day, Orlando is a courtier, an ambassador, falls for a woman, Sasha, and later turns into a woman and marries. A life of incident, indeed.

But virtually all of this is given in description and narrative (at times there are two narrators telling the story) and you have to wonder if some more interesting method to adapt the show couldn’t have been found.

As it is the show falls back on Max Webster’s lively, constantly-moving direction — here harnessed better even than in his Manchester Theatre Awards-nominated To Kill a Mockingbird; and on the entrancing performance of local girl made extraordinarily good, Suranne Jones as Orlando.

In recent years few performers have made the leap from Corrie to the wider acting world with any authority, but two of them have been locals Sarah Lancashire and Suranne —and the latter’s career is hitting an amazing peak.

Suranne is the real deal; an energetic, enticing and starry performer who here adds a liveliness and warmth to a character whose emotions are rarely very clear. As the boy Orlando, Suranne is convincing enough in the ruff and short haircut; as the years go by she blossoms into Orlando’s no-nonsense womanhood with ease.

Her performance is at the centre of a whirlwind of movement — flying from Sasha (Molly Gromadzki), cross-dressing from Richard Hope as the Queen and Thomas Arnold as Orlando’s would-be lover, the use of drapery, tear-away clothing and other devices to keep the narrative flowing and much more.

I can’t say the production is a total triumph, but part of the fault for that is Woolf’s, and part the 2010 adaptation by Sarah Ruhl.

But you can’t fault the energy or the performances — or deny Suranne a likely best-actress nomination when awards time comes round next year...