Recently, I found myself watching two very different stage adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography within the space of a month. First came Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s celebrated 2019 adaptation, Orlando, at the Schaubühne, restaged as part of Festival International New Drama (FIND) following Mitchell’s appointment as this year’s Artist in Focus. Then came Olga Neuwirth’s operatic Orlando at Komische Oper Berlin, a work that also premiered in 2019 but has only now arrived in the capital. The coincidence got me thinking. Nearly a century after its publication in 1928, Orlando remains one of the defining literary touchstones for contemporary queer and trans audiences, securing a near-mythic status within queer culture.
Inspired by her relationship with the writer and poet Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s novel follows its protagonist across centuries, social classes and shifting cultural landscapes. Yet it’s one detail that has come to define the book’s legacy: Orlando falls asleep as a man and wakes as a woman. For years, Orlando has been recommended to me as though it contains some essential truth about my own experience as a queer trans woman.
My discomfort was not with the presence of queer identities on stage. Quite the opposite. It stemmed from a sense that Woolf’s ambiguity had been replaced by certainty.
The assumption seems to be that because Orlando changes from man to woman, the novel must naturally speak to contemporary trans identities. While Woolf undoubtedly explores identity and the social expectations placed on the sexes, I sometimes wonder whether we are retroactively applying modern frameworks to a text written long before they existed. When I transitioned, men began opening doors for me and slapping my ass, although admittedly, not at the same time. The reality of transition often consists of a thousand small social negotiations. Woolf was exploring something expansive and imaginative about identity, but whether that aligns neatly with contemporary experiences of transness is another question entirely. The question, then, is how contemporary adaptations choose to interpret that ambiguity.
Mitchell and Birch’s Orlando is one of the finest pieces of theatre I have ever seen. Combining intricate staging with live video projection, the production moved fluidly between perspectives, performance, film set and costume department, revealing the machinery behind its own illusion. Above the stage, projected footage swung from period costume drama to a modern-day Friends-esque sitcom. Sets expanded, collapsed and transformed in plain sight, while performers shifted between genders, roles and centuries. Queerness was woven into the fabric of the production, but it never felt imposed. Rather than telling the audience what Orlando represents, the piece trusted us to sit with the ambiguity.
The experience of watching Neuwirth’s Orlando at Komische Oper was markedly different. While the production celebrated gender diversity and queer visibility, I found myself increasingly disconnected from its framing. The work seemed determined to present Orlando as a contemporary symbol of LGBTQIA+ liberation. My discomfort was not with the presence of queer identities on stage. Quite the opposite. It stemmed from a sense that Woolf’s ambiguity had been replaced by certainty. The production’s rainbow pageantry and voguing suggested queer life as a perpetual celebration, while the messier realities of lived experience remained largely absent. When Orlando’s non-binary child opened Act 2, declaring themselves with they/them pronouns, the moment felt unusually blunt, as though the production no longer trusted the audience to arrive at its own conclusions.
Watching these productions back-to-back, I realised that my favourite was not necessarily the one that tried hardest to update Woolf for contemporary audiences. It was the one that trusted the audience to sit with subtext. Perhaps that is why Orlando continues to endure. Not because it offers a definitive vision of queer or trans identity, but because it refuses to settle into one.
