Gertrude by Zoë Marsland
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s age-defying, gender-shifting picaresque, Orlando, Gertrude follows
the titular character as they gallop through time, and traipse across gender(s). Beginning with a
Tenth-Century peasant girl, who earnestly believes the tumour growing out of her face is a human man,
continuing to a 17th century veteran actor who finds himself suddenly disposable once “real women...
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s age-defying, gender-shifting picaresque, Orlando, Gertrude follows
the titular character as they gallop through time, and traipse across gender(s). Beginning with a
Tenth-Century peasant girl, who earnestly believes the tumour growing out of her face is a human man,
continuing to a 17th century veteran actor who finds himself suddenly disposable once “real women”
take to the stage...Nuns, lepers, bike couriers, pestilential fever, first love...Gertrude explores the performative opportunities foreclosed to our rigidly gendered selves; the un-lived lives that haunt the lives we do inhabit, and the profound sadness that attends the realization of our limitations.