No crying Woolf on cancelled play in Spain

Spain’s nationalist Vox party has called time on Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching classic Orlando, prompting accusations of homophobia and transphobia.

Tilda Swinton in the 1992 film version of Orlando.

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a ­Biography has been adapted often for stage and screen, but Spain’s nationalist Vox party has called time on her gender-switching classic, prompting accusations of homophobia and transphobia.

The play was due to be performed in Valdemorillo, northwest of Madrid, and had already been approved by the conservative Popular Party council but the entry in June of Vox into local government has brought about a change of heart.

The theatre company Teatro Defondo’s version of Woolf’s novel, based on her relationship with author Vita Sackville-West, has won several awards. However, its director, Pablo Huetos, said he had received a call to say that the incoming council, in which Vox now holds the culture portfolio, had changed its mind about staging the play.

Spain’s Association of Theatre Authors expressed its “most ­indignant rejection” of the ­cancellation.

“The decision reveals, in ­addition to its obvious ideological and authoritarian connotations, a regrettable ignorance, seeming those responsible do not know who Virginia Woolf is and what her works mean in universal culture,” it said.

Woolf’s novel is considered a feminist classic and describes the adventures of a poet who changes gender from a man to a woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history.

The association said the decision recalled “an indecent and grotesque resonance of a past that refuses to die”, referring to an infamous incident in the 1970s when, with Franco still alive, a civil guard demanded the removal of a copy of Goya’s The Naked Maja from a shop window on the grounds of ­indecency.

The Valdemorillo city council said the cancellation was a budgetary issue, a problem that had also affected other events, and denied there was any ideological motive.

However, that did not convince left-wing politicians taking part in Madrid’s Pride parade at the weekend who warned of the consequences of a victory for the right in this month’s general election.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the reactionary wave that was now producing pacts between the Popular Party and Vox were like “a trailer for a horror film”.

However, he has blamed the policies on gender and identity politics of the far-left Podemos party, his government’s junior coalition partner, for alienating centrist voters, particularly male ones.

The Times