Jane Austen with a novel twist
‘Penelope, turn the music down! I can hardly hear myself think over your harpsichord!” This opening line from a new stage production of Jane Austen’s posthumously published novel cannot be found anywhere in the original text. Indeed, you might not recognise Austen’s prose in even half of Jeff James’s and James Yeatman’s inventive and extremely funny adaptation, but they have certainly captured the essence of her characters. Its questioning spirit runs through this show like a subversive message in a stick of Lyme Regis rock.
This new production is set on a rectangular light box, which shifts on its axis whenever our heroine, Anne Elliot (Lara Rossi), on the shelf at 27, encounters Captain Wentworth (Samuel Edward-cook), the man whose marriage proposal she rejected eight years ago and for whom she has mourned bitterly ever since. The running joke is that she, her older sister Elizabeth (Cassie Layton, brilliant) and the two Musgrove girls, Henrietta and Louisa, are, in a postmodern way, aware of 21stcentury courting conventions but stuck within the confines of Austen’s times. Step by step, James explodes those conventions to reveal these characters in all their seething, psychological distress. Everyone is on the edge, their state of mind fraught, their life choices potentially perilous. Only love, or the illusion of it, offers moments of hedonistic relief.
James mines terrific comedy from Austen’s novel often by amplifying what is already there and giving it a modern twist. Mr Elliot, Anne’s foolish, narcissist father, is a raddled hippy who wanders about in a velvet dressing gown undone to the waist. Mary, her younger sister, is an exhausted stay-at-home mother whose shrill, vinegary exchanges with her husband Charles are both true to Austen and utterly modern. Penelope, the widowed Mr Elliot’s ambiguous companion, is now the equally ambiguous Elizabeth’s lesbian best friend. The sublimely funny centrepiece scene, at Lyme Regis, is a riot of soapsuds and sexual tension.
Persuasion is Austen’s most mature and melancholic novel, a frost-tipped exploration of the meaning of love and a quietly savage critique of Regency England’s obsessions with money and class. James offers a parallel commentary on how these sorts of novels are organised, the narrative patterns they conform to, and the parts of the story they leave out. Lara Rossi’s watchful Anne, just as she is in the book, is an outsider, ignored by her family and observing them in turn with a detached, amused contempt, but she is also anxious about the representation of her own story, as a woman in love whose life doesn’t stop at the moment of her marriage. It’s a terrific tribute to Austen in the bicentenary year of her death.