Belvoir’s new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography is a charmer: a light-stepping piece of theatrical rough magic that dances its way across four centuries, from Shakespeare’s time to our own.

Co-adapted by Elsie Yager and director Carissa Licciardello, Orlando opens with a circle of snowflakes on an otherwise empty stage (designed by David Fleischer). The lights go down and everything feels ready for some kind of necromantic spell – an impression heightened by reflective panels whose shimmering adds a visual echo to the actors’ movements.

Amber McMahon (centre) in Orlando. Photo © Brett Boardman

We meet Orlando (Shannen Alyce Quan, the first of four trans or non-binary actors to play the role) as a beardless youth, a young nobleman being inducted into the court of Queen Elizabeth I (Amber McMahon in the first of many well-drawn comic roles). Her Majesty finds herself unexpectedly charmed by this ardent, even brazen young poet.

Awarded his roller skates – as good a symbol of social mobility as any – Orlando ventures beyond the court and into teeming London, where, on a frozen river Thames, he meets a Russian princess (Emily Havea) whose freethinking ways strike a deep chord.

After a brief handover ceremony, Janet Anderson (rather brilliantly) assumes the role of Orlando, who has metamorphosed into a young woman making her debut among the aristocrats of Carolean England. Her peers are quick to school her in the ways women are expected to behave, but as before, the sagest advice comes from an outsider – in this case, a pipe-smoking, harpsichord-playing, blues-singing swashbuckler (Havea).

Janet Anderson (centre) in Orlando. Photo © Brett Boardman

Another handover, another Orlando (Zarif this time), and now we’re in bleak, foggy Victorian England, where Orlando faces a pernickety lawyer (Nix Calder) and the choice to either conform to the gender norm or face destitution.

From there, we move to present-day London, where, seemingly stranded on a Circle Line platform, Orlando (Nic Prior) observes a diverse cross-section of folk. Whooshing trains – conjured in flashing lights and sound – act as guillotines between snapshot vignettes. The backstage costume quick changes, one imagines, must be frantic.

Compressed into less than two hours, Orlando’s journey is inevitably streamlined. For all the production’s wit and inventiveness, its charting of the tides of acceptance and prejudice can feel journalistic at times, and while it’s good to be sent out of a theatre warm and optimistic, the final chapter’s refusal to engage with the upsurge of anti-transgender sentiment, TERFism, and opposition to gender-affirming care for young people, feels like calculated avoidance.

Orlando plays at Belvoir, Surry Hills until 28 September.