Orlando

Overview

The program for this year’s Melbourne Festival is looking a little gender bendy, with international guests including “sissy bounce” MC Big Freedia and legendary transgender singer Antony Hegarty.

Local avant gardesters The Rabble are getting in on the androgyny act with their take on literature’s definitive gender warp, Orlando. The story of a young rake who suddenly, without explanation or much fuss, becomes a woman has been doing people’s heads in since Virginia Woolf penned it in 1928.

The Rabbles’ staging looks like it will be less a direct adaptation and more a spring-boarding from Woolf’s text into a surreal and confronting world all of its own. Emma Valente and Kate Davis, artistic directors of The Rabble, are building a reputation for twisting classic texts into bizarre new shapes, and one can expect this to be as divisive and in-your-face as theatre gets.

Just as Orlando him/herself would like it.