Making Orlando Live: Neil Bartlett in conversation with Dr Eleanor Lybeck

How do you take a novel as slippery and heartfelt as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and bring it to life on stage in a way that will satisfy not only Woolf’s fans but also an audience that has never read the book? And what does it mean to be celebrating this particular story at a time when issues and images of queerness and gender non-conformity are so alive and so contested?

British novelist, playwright and theatre director Neil Bartlett created the script for the acclaimed staging of Orlando at the Garrick Theatre in London in 2022-3. In this event he’ll be talking to Dr Eleanor Lybeck, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University’s Institute of Irish Studies and Department of English (herself adapting Woolf’s Between the Acts), about the nuts and bolts of theatrical adaptation, the process of creating that script in particular, about his own very personal relationship with Woolf - and what it’s like to work with actor Emma Corrin, who played the lead in his adaptation. Neil’s work includes publishing his fifth novel Address Book, a meditation on queer courage, and creating a live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film Blue with much-loved British actor Russell Tovey.

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