Christmas rom-com brings joy
The Arts Club’s tradition of remounting its popular holiday shows continues with Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley.
Last season’s hit returns to the Granville Island Stage with its original cast largely intact. I missed that staging but heard good things about it from reliable sources. Now I can attest to their reliability.
American playwrights Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon have written a clever sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, sweet but not saccharine, more homage than imitation. Seven of the play’s characters reappear from the novel and the eighth is a joyful addition.
Roy Surette’s crisp comic direction, fine acting with a couple of standouts, and only a few awkward moments when the adult rom-com turns cartoonish add up to a very satisfying evening. Knowing Austen’s novel or the film version helps but isn’t required.
Two years after the end of Pride and Prejudice, bookish, unmarried middle-sister Mary (Kate Dion-richard) is spending Christmas at the Pemberley estate where elder sister Elizabeth (Lauren Jackson) now lives happily with husband Darcy (Chris Walters). Also visiting are pregnant sibling Jane (Leslie Dos Remedios), her husband Bingley (Tim Carlson), and giddy, flighty kid sister Lydia (Amanda Testini) without her caddish mate Wickham.
Enter the new guy: nerdy Arthur de Bourgh (Matthew Macdonald-bain), nephew of the novel’s wealthy, dictatorial Lady Catherine, recently deceased. Arthur has inherited her estate but wants only to return to Oxford where he practically lives in the library.
Might he be a good bookish mate for Mary?
He might be, until flirty Lydia gets in the way. Then Lady Catherine’s haughty, snobbish daughter
turns up. Anne de Bourgh (Carmela Sison) claims to be Arthur’s fiancée. Severe complications ensue. But to paraphrase another canonical English writer, this Christmas romance will not allow a marriage of true minds to admit impediments.
Too smart for her own family and melancholy in her solitude, Mary has her standards: “I would rather marry an interesting plant than an ignorant man.” But she also bitterly understands how her gender and genteel poverty limit her aspirations to see and know the world. Dion-richard adeptly reveals Mary’s combination of vulnerability and command with nice comic twists.
Arthur is almost too goofy to be true but Macdonald-bain’s buoyant performance imbues him with a very funny, twitchy sweetness. The other men school him on how to woo (he takes notes) and Mary makes him appreciate the privileged choices he has that she lacks. At every turn Macdonald-bain keeps him fully alive on the stage.
Like Arthur, the characters of Lydia and Anne frequently threaten to go over the comic top, and sometimes do.
Testini and Sison manage to pull them back, and in the Christmas spirit the script brings them back into the fold. The redemptive solidarity of sisterhood at the end is as important as the success of the romance.
Amy Mcdougall’s lush costumes and Ted Roberts’ drawing room set with its much-discussed giant Christmas tree add a handsome visual dimension to this charming foray into Austenland.