THE THEATRE: LANDS OF THE LOST

London’ Orlando,” My Neighbour Totoro,” and The Burnt City.”

- HELEN SHAW

Just after Christmas I spent a few greedy, giddy days attending London productions—running through the rain to the Garrick Theatre, in the West End, for “Orlando,” then getting baffled by the brutalist maze of the Barbican Center while trying to find “My Neighbour Totoro,” and finally zipping out to Punchdrunk’s Woolwich storehouses for “The Burnt City.” There was no logic to it— my planning was catch-as-catch-can. But the shows all turned out to be portraits of worlds grown suddenly, surprisingly larger, and of the rather lost feeling of the small humans at their center. (In one case, that lost human was me.)

I had been particularly eager to see “Orlando,” which slots into the current gender discourse with a nearly audible click. In Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation, as in Virginia Woolf ’s 1928 novel, a poetic young aristocrat named Orlando catches the eye of Queen Elizabeth, embarks on various amorous adventures, falls into a coma, and wakes up changed into a woman. In the book, which is styled as a biography, Woolf ’s narrator tracks Orlando’s transformation, and, for a single paragraph, the text’s “he” changes to “they,” before pivoting to “she.” (Woolf wrote, “The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.”) The show’s gleaming, nonbinary star, Emma Corrin—perhaps best known as the newlywed Princess Diana, from “The Crown”—uses they/them pronouns, the gender-fluid use of which Woolf may have pioneered a hundred years ago. This synchrony feels like fate.