A DANCE AROUND AUSTEN’S LEGACY
The book is known and loved enough: Jane Austen’s first full novel, written with satirical youthful wit but long laid aside unpublished. It gleefully shows how a girl’s daft gothic romanticism comes up humiliatingly against the real-world evils of class , money and sophistication. Love triumphs, with a hero unromantic enough to know that muslin frays in the wash. A classic familiar enough to be played with, billed as as ‘inspired by” and subverted a bit for modern attitudes by Zoe Cooper . So under director Tessa Walker here is a three-hander lark, with much nifty work with hats and coats, parents and relatives mischievously cross-cast, and a bittersweet take on happy ever after.
Before the lights are down Rebecca Banatval as Catharine bounces on ,all sprigged muslin and bonnet to tell her story , starting with her birth into a painfully ordinary and unromantic Northern vicarage and the moment her play-fighting with brothers ends with a first period and a sinking into romantic novels and resentment at a Georgian woman’s lot. It is lively, with fellow-players Sam Newton and AK Golding playing everyone else – Parents, little brother, midwife , then the Allens, all three Tilneys, the venal faux-friend Isabella and the appalling John Thorpe. They switch around with vaudeville nimbleness throughout :only Banatvala stays herself as Catherine nearly all the time: and very beguiling she is in the wannabe heroine’s energetic simplicity and gentle self-mocking delusions.
As the scene switches to Bath society Newton is brilliant as both Tilney and the hooray-Henry coxcomb Thorpe, with joyful tangling with carriage reins and some truly funny Georgian country-dance conversations: that particularly catches the awkwardness of communication while meeting and separating down lines in a crowded ballroom (“I am not dancing anyone” pants Catherine “I am dancing NEAR many people”). All fun, though I may have breached a sigh of resignation as, with the first half ending, the erotic adoration switches to being between Isabella and Catherine. Here we go again, my inner cynic sighed, another classic forcibly lesbianised and degendered for the Pronoun People…
But fair enough, gothic fiction and a few Austen passages do offer enough girlish sweetest-dearest-friendships for such nuances to be permissible, even if here a bit creaky. And as we move on to the Abbe – , an endearing dollshouse prop whisked out of the many trunks and boxes which have been the various sets – we get the required creaks and shrieks and haze and Gothic nonsense and the stiffness of General Tilney (though Cooper mysteriously makes his daughter rather creepy, rather than just downtrodden). Isabella reappears, to utter the central message young Miss Austen brings us: that “we cannot escape the world and how it works”. And Newton’s final speech as Henry is surprisingly, oddly moving in its realism : there is no mystery, no tragedy, no great romance, but flawed people and their sadnesses. And Catharine becomes neither romantic heroine or happy bride but a writer. I like that.
orangtreetheatre.co.uk to 24 feb.
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