Theatre review: Orlando

ON 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.

Then there's the magnificent dynamic of the performance, between actress Madeleine Worrall, in richly intelligent and sensuous form, and Greie, who appears live on stage, helping to capture in physical form the intense duality of Orlando's life. And finally, there are the extraordinary visual images and effects by James Houston and Angelica Kroeger, which reach a climax in the long central sequence of liquid light and shimmering outlines through which Orlando makes her transition from one sex to the other. The overall effect is dazzling; and so rich in texture, and in the layers of meaning surrounding this remarkable story, that it demands to be seen not once, but many times; and each time, I suspect, with more feeling.