Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems to have wandered in from Little Red Riding Hood.

The pack of Woolfs chat away about how to tell the story of an English aristocrat, Orlando, who was a teenager in the 1590s. He enters the stage dressed like a girl. (Confusion over sexual identity is the show’s big idea.) After an opaque interview with Elizabeth I, Orlando moves to the Jacobean era, then to Charles II’s court, then to an embassy in Constantinople and so on. At each brief stop-off he finds evidence of male prejudice against women. The Woolf pack shuffles in and out, discussing his itinerary, and the meandering show is further clarified by a comedy narrator who gives footnotes in a Cockney accent – ‘Constantinople is Istanbul’ – for the benefit of play-goers with learning difficulties. The script, adapted by Neil Bartlett, paints Orlando as a soppy numbskull who talks like a greetings card. ‘A week may add a century to a man’s life,’ he tells us, ‘or it may last three seconds.’

As this is a Michael Grandage production, the costumes, lighting and set designs are world-class and if you enjoy antique fabrics and the chic stylings of yesteryear you’ll be delighted. But you won’t be moved. This isn’t a drama or a story. Orlando can’t function as a character because he has no chance to form relationships, to suffer, to learn, to grow, to fail. He keeps being extracted from one century and parachuted into another. Essentially he’s a cross-dressing detective, a pre-Raphaelite Tintin, trawling through history for proof of male bigotry. And he finds it, believe it or not.

Yes, this show reveals that men once disparaged women’s intellectual powers and exploited them for sexual and dynastic purposes. The question is, why revive a strain of misogyny that no longer exists in the culture of those who enjoy theatre? The battle of the sexes ended decades ago when women asked for equality in the office and at home, thereby doubling their workload, and men instantly agreed to this anti-female bargain. Orlando is like a medieval re-enactment of a castle siege performed by weirdos in funny togs who want to wallow in the atmosphere of an ancient conflict whose outcome can’t be changed. Although it looks sensational, it’s an eccentric triviality aimed at 1970s feminists.

Hex at the National is an amazingly screechy effort. It opens in a magical forest where a Fairy yells and wails about her lack of wings. Enter a courtier dressed like a playing card who shouts as well for obscure reasons. Having kidnapped the Fairy he dumps her in a palace where a character called Queenie yelps and honks non-stop amid a crowd of ballet dancers who cackle away like ill-tempered geese. Queenie has a problem – her baby girl won’t stop screeching. The Fairy puts her in a coma, thank God, and the decibel level subsides finally. A handsome prince (Michael Elcock) struts on to the stage and sings while performing a nifty dance on a table. He’s handsome, fun and charming – a star. He’s attacked by forest sprites and he beats them up in an amusing fight scene. At last the show is entertaining us. But no. Elcock gets shunted aside to make way for an ogress in a purple frock who yells about her pregnancy. That’s right. She’s about to give birth. Could more screeching be on the way? Indeed so. The hollering doesn’t end in the maternity suite. The ogress and the Fairy seem incapable of entering or leaving the stage without bawling at the top of their lungs.

This show, allegedly based on Sleeping Beauty, is not just harmful to the eardrums, it’s clumsily assembled. The second half drops the story about the comatose princess and follows the attempts to stop the ogress from eating her newborn infant. What a charming pair of themes for Christmas: child murder and cannibalism. It’s a pity the NT director Rufus Norris and his wife, Tanya Ronder, who co-authored the script, can’t write a decent story or draw an attractive character. Perhaps they were beguiled by the visual gifts of Katrina Lindsay. Her costume and lighting designs are superb. The centrepiece is a multilayered mock-up of a flying castle that glitters and dazzles like the northern lights. It deserves to be permanently displayed in the NT lobby or inside a glass case at the V&A. It’s that impressive. Small children could be allowed to view it as a treat for a year’s good behaviour. You’ll probably never see a more sumptuous stage property in your life.