Watching Emma Corrin on stage is like seeing someone move through a different element. At first I thought the actor was like a flame. Then I realised that though I had seen flaring, guttering and vanishing, the comparison was partly critical slippage. I had remembered them (Corrin’s preferred pronoun) as The Crown’s Diana, as a candle in the wind. Their really distinctive quality is more fundamental. They make the extraordinary seem utterly natural. They ground the bizarre without domesticating it.
Corrin’s gifts are ideal for incarnating Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling, gender-swapping aristo, whose journey from the age of Gloriana to the 20th century is a guide to why it is hard to be sentient and anti-feminist. The actor’s own recent identification as non-binary gives edge and urgency to Orlando’s illuminated miasma.
