Orlando @ Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, until 22 Mar

'My body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12...' So wrote Virginia Woolf to her lover Vita Sackville-West in 1927, describing her exhilaration at drafting Orlando. It's a semi-autobiographical novel; an extended love letter to the aristocratic Vita; but 'semi' is the crucial word here. At the beginning, Orlando is a 16-year-old aspiring poet in the Elizabethan court. After a seven-day slumber during a debauched trip to Constantinople, he wakes as she. Returning to Britain, she eventually becomes an inter-war woman, silk scarf flapping in the breeze as she drives her motor car.

This stage adaptation by American playwright Sarah Ruhl – first performed in New York in 2010 – is as nimble as Sasha, the Russian princess who enchants Orlando when skating across the frozen River Thames. Though the novel traverses centuries, continents and genders, Ruhl condenses the action into two hours.

Oldham Theatre Workshop alumnus and former Coronation Street star Suranne Jones inhabits the title role with charm and grace. She's gamine as the young Orlando, eager to secure the queen's favour. Later, she's comedic and clumsy, struggling with Lady Orlando's stiff skirts. Jones is joined by Thomas Arnold, Richard Hope and Tunji Kasim as the chorus, both narrating the action and playing the characters who pass through Orlando's life. Hope is especially delightful as Queen Elizabeth I, simultaneously regal in a hooped dress, and bawdy, beckoning the adolescent Orlando on to her damask bedspread. As Sasha, recent RADA graduate Molly Gromadzki is mesmerising. She's enchanting yet duplicitous, and in one acrobatic sequence twists and twirls above the stage like a swallow on a summer evening.

Orlando is beautifully visual, its imagery crafted by director Max Webster, Nicola Meredith's sumptuous costumes, and Charles Balfour's lighting design. It's difficult to choose a highlight: perhaps the illuminated skeleton, doffing his top hat to audience members and providing a Jack Skellington-esque reminder that lust and love are followed by death and decay. Or maybe the dead Queen Elizabeth, her skirts fluttering with fairy lights.

The play ends as the hero(ine) finally completes writing the poem The Oak Tree after centuries of redrafting. She asks a simple question of the creeping darkness: “Orlando, who am I?” It's the central question, interrogating what it means to be male, female or otherwise – all without the clunk of an undergraduate gender studies essay. It's a magical and moving two hours. [Jacky Hall]