Reviving Austen in a black and white revelation
IT IS a truth universally unacknowledged that sooner or later, a stage production of Pride And Prejudice would come along that was not an all-white affair. Daniel Evans, the artistic director of Sheffield Theatres, said ‘the time has come’ to shake up the casting of a play based on Jane Austen’s classic novel.
‘We’re not doing an all-white production of Pride And Prejudice — and I’m really proud of that,’ Evans told me.
Isabella Laughland, who has carved out a strong career in the theatre since playing Leanne, one of Harry Potter’s Hogwart’s school friends, in three of the Potter films (The Half-Blood Prince and the two Deathly Hallows pictures), will star as Jane Austen’s plucky heroine Elizabeth Bennet.
Evans said he and Tamara Harvey, who will direct Austen’s study of social mobility, decided against a ‘bog-standard version’.
‘We want to be adventurous!’ he said. A bit like Elizabeth Bennet.
He noted that Laughland, whose mother is from Guyana and whose father is British, is a first- class actress who recently played Cordelia in King Lear at Chichester and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
She also received good notices for her role in The Last of The Haussmans at the National, with Julie Walters, Helen McCrory and Rory Kinnear. Evans argued that we’re used to colour-blind casting with Shakespeare and ‘anything Elizabethan, Restoration and Jacobean. But somehow, when it comes to the Regency period, we suddenly get all traditional’.
He said he and Harvey both felt it was time for a change.
‘Surely we’re ready to look at those stories in different ways. We just thought that we did not want a bog- standard version,’ he explained.
Michele Austin, who is black, will play Mrs Bennet. She has appeared in sitcom outnumbered and portrayed MP Diane Abbott in The Riots at the Tricycle Theatre in London. Mr Darcy will be played by James Northcote, who was in The Imitation Game and is preparing to portray Benjamin Britten in Tell Me The Truth About Love.
Interestingly, Northcote (who is plain white!) had a part in Amma Asante’s film Belle, which had something of an Austen- esque flavour about it, though its heroine, pl ay e d by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is non-Caucasian. The play will begin previews on May 14 at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre.