An entertaining, gender-bending tumble through the centuries in need of a little less haste.

Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
November 13, 2015

Sarah Ruhl’s playful adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 mockumentary novel, Orlando: a Biography, is a theatrical Schrödinger’s cat. All at once it is both a work for the stage and yet distinctly literary in its narrated prose; it’s depictions have the immediacy of the present but are also historically distant; its characters – a carousel of figures both real and imagined – are as flippant in their genders as this play’s sex-swapping central protagonist. Perhaps most significantly, Orlando is simultaneously epic in its arc and message and yet so buoyantly glib that it’s lighter than air. At the heart of this gender-bending, epoch-hopping, anthropological romp through the life of Orlando is a touching exegesis on sex and sexuality and the liberal freedom or stifling etiquette that have underpinned what it means to be male or female throughout the ages.

Woolf’s aim with her novel was to subvert on multiple levels – her father, a biographer, had introduced Woolf to the format of chronicling a life and so adopting this stuffy medium was an eloquent...