Orlando review – a heartwarming adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling queer adventure

A cast of four trans and non-binary performers play Orlando, and each time a new actor assumes the character we move into a new era. Pictured: Nic Prior. Photograph: Brett Boardman/Belvoir

In the 1920s, modernist author Virgina Woolf was in love with writer Vita Sackville-West. Both were married and had affairs with women. Both felt the limiting effect society had then, and still has, on the life of those who aren’t cis men and have the audacity to live according to their hearts; dream bigger than their worlds allow, and love differently and with abandon.

So Virginia wrote her beloved Vita into a new reality. The novel Orlando: A Biography, dedicated to Sackville-West, follows a young lord of Britain’s Elizabethan era, who lives for hundreds of years, trying on new selves. There’s poetry and adventure and women who are dazzled by him – the world is dazzled by him, just as Woolf was by Sackville-West. At one point, Orlando becomes a woman, and the poetry and adventure and dazzlement continues. It is a fantastical, satirical, flirtatious love letter, and since its publication in 1928, it has been adapted multiple times for screen and stage – most famously the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton.