Emma Corrin is riveting as Virginia Woolf’s sex-switching Orlando

It should be said straightaway that this new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which brings Emma Corrin back to the West End after their assured debut in Anna X last summer, enables people to see one of the stars of The Crown (young Diana, obvs) for the princessly sum of £10. The run has 10,000 tickets at that price: a fitting Yuletide gift.

Inevitably, the best stalls seats are on sale for considerably more (£100 even) than that. But Corrin is worth raiding the piggy bank for. So perfect as Diana, the 26-year-old, who identifies as non-binary, is pretty ideal casting for the hero-heroine of Woolf’s 1928 fictive biography.

“No human being... has ever looked more ravishing,” the book’s narrator sighs, after the eponymous young Elizabethan-age man wakes as the ‘opposite’ sex following a slumber while serving as ambassador for Charles II, thence enduring Peter Pan-ishly, and matter-of-factly, unblemished right up until the present day.

There’s a shock of the nude at the start of Michael Grandage’s 90-minute production. Slipping between a surreal ‘chorus’ identically kitted out in cardies, blouses and skirts to denote a concerned, borderline neurotic pack of chattering Virginia Woolfs, Corrin’s Orlando teases a white smock up to reveal a male member. Thereafter, however, the piece, adapted by queer theatre pioneer Neil Bartlett, throws a modest veil over explicit biological distinctions: the sex-switch indicated by an arched, bared back, Corrin then rising, draped in a sheet, before coolly ambling off for a bath.

The references from then on are to Orlando as a woman, different anatomy inferred, but a hint of ambiguity remains. That’s in keeping with the book’s disdain for spelling things out in too much detail (“Let other pens treat of sex and sexuality”) and allows ingress for today’s ideas (which Woolf surely anticipated) of an individual placing their perceived gender identity above outlying convention or physiques.

Even so, it’s a disappointment how hands-off Bartlett’s interpretation is. He luxuriates in a decorous and familiar – if caperingly enjoyable – theatricality, Orlando trying on attitudes and costumes as centuries fly by and fashions shift, a Restoration lady about town one minute, a roving dandy the next, a magnet for the equivalently ambivalent. Grandage arranges the brisk pageant of vignettes with painterly finesse.

But while there’s much ado by the noting and scribbling Virginias – plus a bustling Deborah Findlay as cockney housekeeper Mrs Grimsditch – about how difficult issues are being explored, it all feels coyly skin-deep. The constraints of ‘polite’ Victorian society are genteelly sketched, the wonder, pain and injustices of womanhood and difference left barely verbalised. And is Bartlett afraid of Woolf’s wittily florid prose? The tingle factor of the “great frost fair” of 1607 aside, her elegant voice feels neutered, with some toe-curling Shakespearean pastiche added too.

What anchors attention is the coruscating Corrin. Whether it’s a darting, impish look, a nymph-like movement, a roguish smile that’s dazzling as a lighthouse, some put-on manly insouciance or a frisson of confused desire, you’re ever in the presence of pure star quality.

Until Feb 25. Tickets: 0330 333 4811; nimaxtheatres.com