Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
Orlando, Photo: © Stephen Cummiskey, 2019 
 

Orlando

by Virginia Woolf
In a version of Alice Birch
Translated from English by Brigitte Walitzek
Director: Katie Mitchell

Stage A

A heroine who is born a hero; or a hero who becomes a heroine – does it even matter? Orlando experiences four centuries of British and European human history. He lives at the court of Elizabeth I; falls tragically in love with a Russian princess at the fabled banquet on the frozen River Thames during the reign of James I; dabbles in writing; becomes Charles II’s ambassador to Constantinople. He returns to Great Britain a woman, writes, throws parties in the enlightened 18th century, loves men and women, both prostitutes and nobles and, in the buttoned-up Victorian era, marries a man. Man or woman, does Orlando even have to decide? Orlando witnesses how people, nature, systems and reigns are in a constant state of flux; and how customs, habits and ideas of how a man or a woman should behave are constantly being modified, as well as what is right and what is wrong, what an artist should write about and what a woman is allowed to think about. Orlando experiences how the weather and the political climate change, how desire and gender roles develop. Orlando sees people who take for nature what is actually man-made.

In her biography of Orlando, Virginia Woolf describes a life that undermines every rigid category with ease and artistic freedom, imbuing them with new meaning or presenting them as fluid. She playfully interweaves life and art, reality and fiction into a visionary work and creates one of literary history’s most dazzling heroines whose overabundance of identities leapfrogs any narrow definition or rigid categorisation.

In a production combining performance on stage with live video, Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch explore Orlando’s queer journey through various centuries of the patriarchal history of humankind.

Author: Virginia Woolf
Direction: Katie Mitchell
Co-Direction: Lily McLeish
Set Design: Alex Eales
Costume Design: Sussie Juhlin-Wallen
Video Director: Grant Gee
Video: Ingi Bekk
Collaboration Video: Ellie Thompson
Music and Sound Design: Melanie Wilson
Dramaturgy: Nils Haarmann
Lighting Design: Anthony Doran
Duration: ca. 100 minutes

Premiered on 5 September 2019

Tour Dates

Paris (September 2019)
Lissabon (April 2023)
Madrid (April 2023)
Gothenborg (September 2023)



Co-production with Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe, Paris, Teatros del Canal Madrid, Göteborgs Stadsteater/Backa Teater and São Luiz Teatro Municipal, Lisbon. In cooperation with the European Theatre Network PROSPERO. Supported by the Friends of Schaubühne Berlin.