Orlando review – Katie Mitchell's gleeful celebration of gender fluidity

The titular character in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is often seen standing at windows and their framing is a recurring motif: in mirrors, in paintings and photographs and by shifting societal expectations. Such frames feature prominently in Katie Mitchell’s new multimedia production at Berlin’s Schaubühne. Adapted from Woolf’s novel by Alice Birch, it is an irreverent but moving examination of gender and desire, and a beautifully apposite melding of thematic content and theatrical form.

As is customary in Mitchell’s multimedia stagings, which mix performance with live video and filmed footage, it takes a small intricately organised village to create the image that flanks the stage. While Orlando lives an elongated life of centuries, on stage is a complex ballet, synchronised to gracefully frenetic fractions of a second. This provides the dual pleasure of witnessing not only the story being told but how it is constructed.

And with a wry irreverence, our pleasure is often acknowledged. We watch as Orlando (the astonishing Jenny König) shags his way through successive lovers of both genders: he looks into the camera and gives a cocky, knowing wink. While the novel has been disparagingly referred to as a romp, here it is often intentionally played as such. And on Alex Eales’s set, anachronisms abound (Orlando surveys the changed London skyline from a plane rather than a ship), and Sussie Juhlin-Wallén’s striking colour-coded period costumes, ridiculous and sublime, suggest that this is an Orlando both of their own times and also of ours.

What such gleeful use of anachronisms signal is that Mitchell and Birch’s Orlando is imbued with the queer sensibility of its source material. Intricate stage pictures, like historical narratives and gender norms, all are constructs, complicated fleshy creatures of often chaotic desires and wants. But then we see Orlando, fluid and fulfilled. She looks into the camera once more, the frame a little looser: she smiles.