Corrin proves she has the X-factor with a perfect West End debut
P‘She inclines her head, angles a leg, arches an amused eyebrow; it’s all camera-ready’
laying Diana, Princess of Wales, to uncanny perfection in The Crown has brought Emma Corrin instant acclaim and bankability. She can pride herself on a Golden Globe win, and this week she earned an Emmy nomination too.
Now, at just 25, she demonstrates an equivalent wow-factor on the London stage, making her theatrical debut in a role that has intriguing points of comparison with the “people’s princess” – yet reveals the actress in a whole new light.
Corrin plays the titular anti-heroine in Joseph Charlton’s transfixing drama, Anna X, concluding the “Re:Emerge Season” of new plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre. This is no blushing English rose, but a hard-headed femme fatale who infiltrates wealthy Manhattan society by letting it be inferred that she has money to burn.
Charlton has modelled the character on the Russia-born fraudster Anna Sorokin, who went by the name of “Anna Delvey” and adopted the guise of an heiress, cadging and scamming her way into the high life and trying to procure funds for a fancy New York art foundation-cum-members club.
Sentenced in 2019, Sorokin was released from prison this year, and her story will be told in a forthcoming Netflix series. But Charlton, who impressed with a 2018 fringe play inspired by the birth of Uber (now in development for the BBC), has got there first. This 80-minute piece, centring on the romance between Anna and the credulous CEO of a bespoke dating app, Ariel (TV star and stage-newcomer Nabhaan Rizwan), is a smart parable about the smoke-andmirrors social-media age.
Charlton makes Corrin’s smooth operator a richly sustained enigma, the better to hook in financially biddable male attention; she’s like a human Ponzi scheme. In this respect, there’s a connection with The Crown. Though her personality is far removed from Diana’s bashful restraint, the selfpromoting Anna is artfully aware of how she’s perceived, and how her value can derive from others’ projection.
Though we only get flashes of Di-like warmth – sweet, subtle smiles and sidelong looks – there’s an elegance to Corrin’s composure that fans of her calling-card hit will recognise. Svelte in a whitish highneck top and beige trousers, blonde hair short and androgynous, she never makes an uncalculated move. She inclines her head, angles a leg, arches an amused eyebrow; it’s all cameraready.
Yet devotees of The Crown will also relish something wholly fresh. Right from the start of Daniel Raggett’s visually stunning production, when Corrin materialises in a nightclub, doing lots of insouciant bopping and trying to make herself heard over the thudding music, she exudes a revelatory steeliness. Donning a tough Eastern European accent, she continually addresses the audience, relaying her experiences in a lyrical but oddly detached second-person fashion. You can see why Rizwan’s likeable, doe-eyed geek is so smitten.
The requirement that the pair portray ancillary characters as well – in Corrin’s case, a financial honcho, office brat and one of Ariel’s old flames – is a kind of distraction, but a marker of their versatility.
Anna X is a fast, seductive show. Its hipness is accentuated by a state-ofthe-art video design that turns a drab back wall into a glittering kaleidoscope of teeming images roving from location to location, complete with Manhattan panoramas. It’s also, at root, a profoundly sad one, in a modern way; this couple kiss, but they can’t connect. Living the American dream to the point of nightmare, Anna has turned her mystique into a commodity; to relinquish that would be like destroying the concept of herself. The last line is “Perfect” – and that just about sums this play up.
Until August 4. Tickets: 0844 871 7622; atgtickets.com