"I've never worked harder in my life," says Suranne Jones. Given that she has been performing since the age of eight, made her professional debut at 16 and her career has included a four-year stint as Karen McDonald on Coronation Street, this is saying something.
Sounding tired but exhilarated, Jones is three weeks into rehearsals for Orlando, adapted from Virginia Woolf's novel by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Max Webster at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. She has recently been filming the first world war medical drama The Crimson Field for the BBC, a process which entailed long days in the wet and the cold, but Orlando requires a different kind of stamina.
She is working with the aerialist Vicki Amedume of Upswing and the movement director Liz Rankin, formerly of DV8, on the production. "I'm 35, not 25," she laughs. "I'm finding muscles in my stomach I didn't know existed." Jones says, "I love the kind of work Complicite and Kneehigh do, but loving and understanding a thing is not the same as performing it. [Orlando is] an incredibly physical piece. I'm learning to express myself in different ways."
Orlando requires Jones to remain on stage at all times and her costumes are changed to reflect the passing of the centuries, for Woolf's young Elizabethan noble is not a character constrained by time. The novel, published in 1928, is Woolf at her most playful, toying with ideas of biography, identity and gender. Orlando is, in the beginning, a man but emerges from upheaval in Constantinople a woman. Jones sees it as a story not of transformation but of continuity. "I never looked at it as male or female; she was always a woman, just a woman who happens to start out as a 16-year-old boy."
Webster's production uses the 2003 adaptation by the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (whose In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play was staged at the Ustinov in Bath in 2012). It was Ruhl's version of Orlando that Jones encountered first, before she turned to the original novel. She was struck first by the humour of Ruhl's version – it's much funnier than she expected it to be, funnier, she suspects, than Sally Potter's opulent 1992 film version, in which Tilda Swinton starred, though she has refrained from watching this in full. She considered it, but then thought, "No, don't do this."
Having initially found it a bit of struggle, she "fell in love" with the novel once she had found the time to properly immerse herself in it. There is a degree of relish in her voice as she talks me through the journey on which Orlando goes, the way the character's life is reflected in lovers taken along the way, the way she is briefly "consumed by sex, by what Woolf called the vulture of lust", the way "she learns from the world" and the way in which Orlando, ultimately, "becomes herself in the end". She is also interested in what the novel has to say about depression and the changing position of women in society over time. "Women in 2014 are in a much more fortunate position. Of course inequalities still exist, but we can work, we can write, we have a voice."
Jones's post-Corrie career has been incredibly varied. She is probably better known now for playing DC Rachel Bailey in ITV's Scott & Bailey – based on an original idea by Jones and her Coronation Street co-star Sally Lindsay. As Jones has said in the past, it's a female-led show where the characters weren't just "wife-of, sidekick-to, mother-of, mistress-to …" She has also spoofed the police procedural in Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier's A Touch of Cloth and played the human incarnation of the Tardis matrix in the Neil Gaiman-penned Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife (a role not entirely free of parallels to Orlando).
Soon after leaving Coronation Street, Jones took a role in the West End production of A Few Good Men, opposite Rob Lowe and she appeared at the Royal Exchange in Blithe Spirit in 2009. While filming Scott & Bailey, she sat down with one of the Royal Exchange's artistic directors, Sarah Frankcom, to look at a number of possible projects – Thérèse Raquin and Mary Stuart were mentioned – before settling on Orlando. With the recent Manchester premiere of Simon Stephens' Blindsided and Maxine Peake's Hamlet on the cards, she says that it is a particularly exciting time for theatre in her home city.
There is one line of Orlando that stands out for her – about the "tricky business" of time, how a person can be "hundreds of years old though they call themselves 36". Jones found this particularly resonant. "Yes, I know what that means. I understand that line."
