Sydney Theatre Company presents
ORLANDO
From the novel by Virginia Woolf
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl

Australian premiere

A portrait of a woman as a young man

Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando has been described as the longest and most charming love letter in literature. Inspired by Woolf’s affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, it is part biography, part fabulation, part poetry.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, or the vibrator play) brings Woolf’s novel to the stage with all the luscious lyricism and playfulness of the original. As the story unfolds, we sail effortlessly across five centuries, taking in London and Constantinople, Russian beauties and Romanian aristocrats, always with a wink in the eye. The adventures pile up, as do the lovers, and somewhere along the line our hero becomes a heroine.

At the heart of it all is the magnetic Jacqueline McKenzie as the gallant, rhapsodic, brooding and brilliant Orlando. Guided by Resident Director Sarah Goodes, this light-hearted, gender-bending frolic through the ages will be given a playful, delicate new production.