ORLANDO Comes to Belvoir This September

Belvoir is turning up the heat with Carissa Licciardello and Elsie Yager’s joyous and cheeky new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s queer classic Orlando, from 30th August to 21st September 2025. 

Woolf’s pioneering work is a fanciful exploration of gender, identity, and societal constructs, inspired by the novelist’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Orlando is young, rich and handsome. A courtier in the time of Elizabeth, he sets out in search of love, life, and a fabulous destiny – but he has to travel through 400 years to find it. He dashes through time, from wars and revolutions to the decadence of the Restoration and the rise of industrial capitalism under Queen Victoria, to modernity – and as the world changes, so does Orlando. Who are they – woman? man? or something which defies all the old orders?

The stellar cast includes actor and activist Janet Anderson (Green Door Theatre’s Sistren, Darlinghurst Theatre Co’s Overflow, KXT’s Mercury Fur), Nyx Calder (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), Emily Havea (Malthouse Theatre’s Truth), Amber McMahon (Master and Margarita), Nic Prior (Tiny Beautiful Things), Shannen Alyce Quan (Holding the Man, Fangirls) and Zarif (NTofP’s Choir Boy).

Belvoir’s Artistic Director Eamon Flack said, “This is a bold new version of Woolf’s cheekiest, most brilliant creation...It’s a visionary text, a century old, pinging with ideas about very present themes – gender, imperialism, nature, technology – and this fresh team of game-changing artists are, in some ways, the very people Woolf and her Orlando dreamed of. One for those who like their theatre theatrical and want to see the world through a new lens.”

Director and co-adapter Carissa Licciardello said, “Orlando as a book and as a story is such a love letter to queer community. Woolf was writing this pseudo-historical novel but, in an incredible act of subterfuge, was also sneaking in all this radical and subversive content for the time, where characters can change gender or fall in love with a person not knowing what their gender is.”

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