Orlando – A Biography

In her famous 1928 novel "Orlando" – a homage to her beloved friend and writer Vita Sackville-West – Virginia Woolf answers the complex question of identity and mutability of gender, which resists heteronormative attributions. And with Orlando, he creates one of the most dazzling characters in the novel, who effortlessly walks back and forth between times, worlds, genders and identities.

Orlando is a person who has lived in a man's body for about 30 years and now, after a seven-day sleep, awakens as a woman*. Orlando's life, which stretches from the late 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century, oscillates between the Occident and the Orient, between the golden Elizabethan and the bourgeois Victorian age, all the way to England in the roaring 1920s of the last century and is determined by the most diverse layers of identity and memory. Orlando remains young during his or her 400-year life and discovers the world from both male* and female* perspectives. There is also great diversity within these two identities: conservative and liberal periods alternate over the centuries – and with them the demands on "the masculine" and "the feminine". Orlando lives through them all: Orlando falls in love and has his heart broken, goes to Constantinople as an envoy, travels with the travellers. Orlando enjoys erotic acquaintances with men and women, marries, has a child and becomes a poet.

Orlando is and remains a searching person, never quite "he", never quite "she". Orlando feels too clearly an unease about the normatively defined gender differences and the resulting expectations. Orlando is free of all this and moves dazzlingly between worlds.

Director Corinna von Rad and her team go in search of traces of a life biography that cannot be and yet is. Orlando's "IchSchichten" are stripped of their leaves and put on and taken off with relish.

The production is a joint project of the drama and opera departments of the Lucerne Theatre under the musical direction of the great Graubünden musician and actor Jürg Kienberger.

Language: German
From 14 years.