Can the cult comedy stage show capture the West End?
Comedy show Austentatious was a pub circuit hit – now they’ve arrived in the West End. Tristram Fane Saunders looks at their rise
As we mark the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, it’s the perfect time to revisit her works. Who can forget her gritty tale of love and addiction, Meth Comes to Pemberley? Or that bloodthirsty epic, Game of Scones?
If these titles sound unfamiliar, you probably haven’t been to see Austentatious. This cult comedy stage show – in which a team of improvisers invent a new Austen-inspired drama every night, based on a daft title suggested by the audience – has become a word-of-mouth hit, playing to packed houses around the country.
Fresh from a UK tour, the eightstrong troupe make their West End debut this December at the Piccadilly Theatre. The glitzy 1,200-seat venue is a step up from the cramped pub in nearby Leicester Square, where just six years ago they performed their first show – to an audience of 12.
“Our gigs were really sporadic in the early days,” says founding member Andrew Hunter Murray. “We did shows anywhere they would begrudgingly spare us a few chairs.”
Murray, along with his coperformer Joseph Morpurgo, first toyed with the idea of literary improv at Oxford University, where the pair were part of the Oxford Imps, an improvised comedy group.
“We did a Byron and Shelleythemed improvised comedy together, based on the time they went on holiday to Lake Geneva with Mary Shelley – the trip during which she wrote Frankenstein,” recalls Murray. “I was Percy Shelley, and Jo [Morpurgo] was Byron’s weird doctor, Dr Polidori, author of The Vampyre.”
However, it was their fellow “imps” Rachel Parris and Amy Cooke-hodgson – also now members of Austentatious – who first came up with the idea of an Austen-themed improv show. “After university, we knew we still wanted to improvise,” says Murray. “We wanted to stretch ourselves a bit, from Whose
Line Is It Anyway-style games to a full, hour-long story. We looked around the Improv community, which at the time was very small, and found Cariad [Lloyd] and Graham [Dickson], and got them involved.”
Their early performances had a few hiccups. “The day we had our first ever big reviewer in, one of our main actors had a near-fatal choking experience and had to be removed, mid-show. So not only might he have died, we might also have got a bad review.”
It wasn’t their only brush with disaster. “We had another show where a baby bird fell out of the rafters on to our bird-phobic technician. Fortunately, our cellist happened to be a trained bird-handler.”
Undaunted by early teething problems, in 2012, they took their show to the Free Fringe in Edinburgh for a month of back-to-back shows. It proved an instant hit: soon audiences were queuing down the street to see it. They’ve since been back every August for sell-out runs.
Their success on the Fringe prompted more bookings – and soon they were struggling to make time for their other work. Outside of the Austen “superhero team”, says Murray, they all have a “Clark Kent” persona – as actors, teachers, writers or comedians. Lloyd has appeared in Peep Show and currently stars with Parris in BBC Three’s Murder in Successville;
Morpurgo has created several acclaimed one-man shows (his latest,
Hammerhead, plays at the Soho Theatre in January); Murray, meanwhile, works as a researcher for quiz show QI, and writes for Private Eye magazine.
“As time went by, we were really running ourselves ragged, because all of us were needed for every show.” They recruited two more friends from the improv circuit, Daniel Nils Roberts and Charlotte Gittins. Each performance now features six of the eight-strong ensemble; the rotating cast allows them to juggle the show with their “Clark Kent” commitments.
This breathing space has proved essential, as they take on ever more frequent shows in even larger venues. Why is there such insatiable demand?
“People love Jane Austen – there’s a huge well of affection for her in this country,” says Murray, who specialised in the author’s work while studying at Oxford. “She’s a genius. In a short, made-up-on-the-spot show, it’s hard to convey even one per cent of that brilliance. But I hope she would have liked some of our one-liners.”
Of course, Austen had plenty of good one-liners of her own. “No one tells you how killingly funny the books are,” says Murray. “In Austen’s novels you always have a believable central character with a rich inner life, surrounded by a cast of grotesque idiots – like Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs
Bennet, or Lady Catherine de Bourgh. That’s the perfect marriage of serious and stupid that we hope to achieve.”
With more than 500 shows under their belt, the troupe have honed their craft to the point where they can take any prompt from the audience, however odd, and instantly turn it into an 80-minute drama. “Our benchmark for a really good show is one which is not only extremely funny, but one where you also genuinely care about the characters,” says Murray.
The cast are committed to creating a show based on the audience’s first suggestion (though they share the most amusing unused ideas on their Twitter feed). Of course, some titles are easier to work with than others. “The Wildebeest and the Android’s Parents!”
grins Murray. “That was hard.”
You won’t catch them aiming for easy laughs with jokes about Trump and Brexit. “People want a story,” says Murray. “They don’t just want to see the news events of the last fortnight retold in a funny voice and an amusing Regency costume, with cello accompaniment.”
Topical references would also ruin their carefully constructed period aesthetic. The cast have to keep an eye out for historical inaccuracies, as Murray explains. “Occasionally one of us has slipped and said ‘Just phone me later’. All hell breaks loose. They try to justify what a ‘phone’ might mean in 1814 – and the other characters will press them on exactly how it works. Sometimes if someone has fluffed up there’s nothing funnier than really pinning them down.”
The historical setting is the only thing common to every performance. It leads to some odd rules: zombies are allowed, but post-1814 inventions are not.
The resulting shows are often ridiculous, but Murray believes they share certain qualities of Austen’s writing that are often overlooked.
“There’s a huge industry that feeds off Austen’s legacy,” he says. “Just look at the new Jane Austen on the £10 note. The portrait is a Victorian prettification of an incomplete, mysterious picture. That’s a perfect symbol of what we want to avoid. Austen wasn’t pretty or sweet or demure. She was waspishly funny!
“She’s much more than a line on a banknote,” he continues. When that note entered circulation in September, the choice of quote which appears by her portrait (“I declare after all there is no enjoyment but reading!”) was criticised for missing Austen’s irony. The line is spoken by Pride and
Prejudice’s hypocritical Miss Bingley, who – as Murray reminds me – “was obviously lying to get into Darcy’s pants”.
Murray hopes Austentatious might encourage audiences to revisit Austen’s work, and rediscover her acerbic wit. “We want to avoid the twee-ification of Jane. She could be spiky. She could be actively cruel. There is an idea that her novels are just posh young men and women in bonnets being very chaste and trading gently amusing witticisms. But there’s so much more to her than that… though you might not think so when you’re watching our characters grow tentacles in Aliens Come to Derbyshire.”
‘It’s hard to convey 1 per cent of Austen’s brilliance. But I hope she would have liked some of our one-liners’