Eccentric triviality aimed at 1970s feminists: Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems to have wandered in from Little Red Riding Hood.

The pack of Woolfs chat away about how to tell the story of an English aristocrat, Orlando, who was a teenager in the 1590s. He enters the stage dressed like a girl. (Confusion over sexual identity is the show’s big idea.) After an opaque interview with Elizabeth I, Orlando moves to the Jacobean era, then to Charles II’s court, then to an embassy in Constantinople and so on. At each brief stop-off he finds evidence of male prejudice against women. The Woolf pack shuffles in and out, discussing his itinerary, and the meandering show is further clarified by a comedy narrator who gives footnotes in a Cockney accent – ‘Constantinople is Istanbul’ – for the benefit of play-goers with learning difficulties.