Anna Karenina

Sheffield Theatres – 2021

Admired but unfulfilled, Russian socialite Anna Karenina is faced with a choice – remain with her husband to keep her beloved child, or risk ruin in the pursuit of passion.

The steam train is an element that appears on many book covers or posters of Tolstoi’s classic – it’s a symbol of the industrial age that the action is set in, and it plays a pivotal role in Anna’s story: she first meet Vronsky at a train station, where she witnesses a tragic accident, and *spoilers alert* she takes her own life by throwing herself under the wheels of a train at the end of the book.

The final image, created using stock images, show Anna’s profile hovering over a steam train, with the smoke turning into her hair, and the train becoming the line of her corsage.