The stage pictures begin to have real thematic bite, as when the onset of repressive Victorianism is represented by a tailor's dummy in a funereal bombasine dress which moves in and topples as the tension mounts, with Richardson adopting a similarly broken pose by its side. In Sally Potter's magical, sumptuous 1993 film, Orlando also became a camply astute commentary on national pride and its self deceptions. Jonathan Miller recently claimed that the English "would wade through a lake of pus" to get to a country house. The film guyed this national trait by subverting the tradition of the Brideshead / Howards End-type movie.

Beautifully reimagining the book in cinematic terms, the film's last view of an Orlando now liberated from her past was of her as a National Trust visitor to her old home, seen through the wobbly camcorder of her little daughter. A hard act, this, to follow. Does Robert Wilson's stage version - a solo show starring Miranda Richardson - offer a comparably fresh and thematically developed vision of the piece? The answer, I'm afraid, is no. This highly abstract and choreographed staging has, by and large, nothing to declare but its technique.With her unnerving translucency and a boyish red bob, Richardson cuts a convincingly ambiguous figure in the earlier scenes. But there's a painful lifelessness and tricksy aridity about the Jacobean and Constantinople episodes that continues up to and through the moment of her gender change. Bafflingly, this takes place with Ms Richardson hidden behind a gigantic absurdist tree, her elongated drawlings punctuated by the recorded sounds of smashing glass. The fact that Richardson begins by delivering her story as restrospect encourages her to develop an alienatingly knowing attitude to experiences we should see her living through without the sophistication of hindsight.The show improves enormously once Orlando is a woman. It is many things: a lengthy lesbian love letter to Vita Sackville-West; a slyly seditious reworking of the conventions of male biography; a feminist meditation on gender and cultural conditioning; and a celebration of the androgenous spirit.

It was all so scandalous, yet innocent: the perfect Renaissance impression.. Taking an Elizabethan noble boy on a gender-bending, fantastical, 300-year voyage into 20th-century womanhood, Virginia Woolf's Orlando has itself a diverse identity. Sometimes, these huge instruments seemed too loud, as when they competed with a brilliantly realised rustle of consonants in "Vaga su spina ascosa".Some of the later madrigals are little dramas; the dialogue of Floro and Florida in "A Dio Florida bella" was discreetly hand-led, not pulled apart by the freedoms of semi-staging.There were special showpieces: memorable were the clash and blend of the women's voices in "Ohime, dov'e il mio ben", and the absurd exchanges of the men in "Gira il nemico", a madrigal about warfare which was done as a comic production number.Usually, however, it was the precision and unanimity that impressed, in the manner of a string quartet, the singers glancing at each other and moving their bodies in unison. Very few of the pieces were sung unaccompanied (indeed, "Amarilli, del candido ligustro", which began the second half, was less successful), the two enormous archlutes being used wherever possible.

The voices are intimate yet fresh and resinous, with the kind of reedy tone that suggests insolence and scandal. There is no hint of "early-music" pallor; everything comes across with take-it- or-leave-it brio.Sometimes the manneristic polish is almost too expert, too uniform. Every phrase is shaped away to a pianissimo, every note swells to a rich fullness and then dies towards the cadence. But the bewitching rapid detail of "Io mi son giovinetta", with the two sopranos as cheeky girls, the richly savoured dissonances of "Non m'e grave il morire", the sensual caressing of phrases in "La bocca onde l'asprissime parole", all bore witness to the endless variety of this extraordinary composer. It will have the bathroom here" - the clown moves his hand above an imaginary plan - "and it has to have lots of sea shells. You'll be able to hear the sound of the seas from above, and when you enter the bathroom some spray ought to hit you in the face.".