Virginia Woolf’s classic Orlando gets a remake for the twenty-first century in Orlando: A Pornobiography, playing this 10th November until 12th December at the New Diorama Theatre in Euston, London.

SISSY: Advice to the young. It’s only dress-up. Don’t let it ruin your life.

Three boys, hunting on palace grounds, spot a girl. Two strangers skate together on the frozen River Thames. A young man and a married crossdresser meet for a playdate. Centuries pass, and Orlando has just bought a plane ticket to Neukölln, Berlin.

Part pornographic bildungsroman, part frosted fever dream, Orlando: A Pornobiography is a restless transmission across time. Gliding between the surreal and the hyperreal, this unruly epic sees the 16th Century ring a phone sex hotline to find the 21st Century on the other end of the line, asking for a body capable of surviving its own desire.

Across erotic entanglements, historical ruptures, and queer intrusions, an ensemble of trans-femme performers tear through this brazen anti-adaptation from award-winning duo piss / CARNATION.

piss / CARNATION are Charli Cowgill and Laurie Ward, who both perform alongside queer scene legend Sharon Le Grand, Macy Seelochan and Mary Malone.

piss / CARNATION make fervent and interdisciplinary theatre work about trans-femininity. Their name comes from pissnelke, German for wild flowers that grow in urine-soaked areas. piss / CARNATION combine brutality with tenderness, abjection with glamour and experimental forms with uncompromising honesty.