Unfinished Austen is no end of fun
The Watsons Minerva Chichester
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the world will never tire of Jane Austen. With a wit worthy of Austen herself, who gleefully sent up the vogue for Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey, Laura Wade knowingly becomes a part of the rapacious Austen industry with her very funny adaptation of Austen’s unfinished fragment The Watsons. It’s about an impoverished 19-year-old, Emma, in need of a husband, and it reads like a rough precursor to Pride
and Prejudice. Austen abandoned the novel around 1805; when Wade’s version reaches the end of Austen’s text, She introduces a new character, Laura, a modern-day playwright, who wants to work with the characters alongside Austen’s brief outline for the novel to imagine what might happen next.
Audiences enjoying the Regency charm of Austen’s original in Samuel West’s sprightly production – as Grace Molony’s coolly sceptical Emma fends off the competing attentions of local cad Tom Musgrave, the charmingly earnest parson Mr Howard and the exceptionally rich but dysfunctional Lord Osborne – may feel themselves rudely jolted out of their reverie when Laura the playwright turns up at the Watsons’ déclassé little house, initially disguised as a maid.
But taking the audience out of the Jane Austen comfort zone is one of the many aims of Wade who, throughout a play at once skittish and scholarly, persistently pays tribute to her heroine while attempting to liberate Austen’s characters from the social straitjackets and favoured literary tropes of the time. So, as Laura the playwright tries to dictate the outcome of each character’s story as Austen imagined it, they reject the narrative that’s been planned for them and run amok. The increasingly self righteous Emma cops off with a soldier; the upright Lady Osborne runs off with the nanny while Emma’s flighty younger sister Georgina ensnares the mirthless Lord Osborne.
It’s both a clever exploration of the tyranny of power structures, be they political, patriarchal or artistic, and terrific fun. There’s an elasticity to Wade’s writing that allows the play to be pulled in almost any direction (at one point, it tips a knowing hat at Brexit as the characters vote to decide whether to take back control; at another, Laura has a nervous breakdown) without ever losing shape.
The cast is uniformly on form – maintaining the lethal lightness of Austen’s peerlessly barbed wit, while rampaging, Pirandello-style, through the fourth wall. Less successful is the character of Laura herself, who is prone to making blunt-headed points about the limited nature of women’s stories in Regency England and the considerably less limited nature of them today.
But Wade has already proven herself as radical as Austen when it comes to subversive depictions of female experience – witness the success of her last play, Home, I’m Darling, about a woman living happily in a Fifties fantasia of her own making – and she does so again here.