Pride and Prejudice
People's Theatre
19th Nov 2019
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a novel with a lot going on. At it’s very basic, it is a romance story that surely must have been the blueprint for every Mills and Boon ever written. Girl meets arrogant man, hates him on site. He falls for a beauty whose background presents him with a major personal conflict. He resists but against the better judgement of his head, his heart is smitten. They proceed to misunderstand each other for most of the story (if you don’t want spoilers look away now) but of course and common sense win out in the end.
But it is so much more than this mere love story. It looks at relationships and responsibilities in society, and within the circle of families and friends. It questions attitudes to women, to the armed forces. It exposes class boundaries and the snobbery and prejudice that these elicit in the upper classes. Jane Austen herself broke those boundaries by daring not only to write , but to write about the very society that said she, as a woman, could not. She ridicules, in the nicest possible way, the social niceties, showing up the absurdity of the social formalities that keep women, and the ‘socially inferior’ in their rightful place.
All of these elements are present in Helen Jerome’s adaptation for the stage. And yet somehow it misses the mark of Austen’s accomplishment. For sure the ridiculing of society is there, but the romance...or perhaps more the sympathy is missing. The play jumps from country house to assembly, to grand mansion and back again, revealing aspects of the characters and the story like a partially lit room. We see parts but not the whole. And so we see the absurdity of society in all its glory but the delicacy of the love story is missed. The nuances of developing attractions, and duplicitous beaux are squashed under seemingly lightning bolt revelations. Act two in particular feels disjointed and rushed as Jerome hurtles us towards the finale.
That said, the cast at the People’s have recreated the characters – in some cases quite spectacularly. Anna Dobson as Mrs Bennett wails her woes hysterically at her husband and daughters, swerving seamlessly from disdain to admiration for fellow characters as the situation warrants. The young daughters (Zoe Rankin, Emily Ashton and Millie Hackett) bicker and sulk their way through the play as only teenagers can. Adam Owers’ Darcy is condescendingly aloof throughout, with just the right amount of disarming discomfort to show his inner struggle as he tries to express his feeelings to Elizabeth (Amy Lowes Smith). But by far the stars of the production are Stephen Waller as Mr Collins who oozes his way across the stage and wraps himself with oily obsequiousness around anyone who can further his cause, and Rye Mattick as the main object of his sycophancy, Lady Catherine de Bourgh - imperious and fully assured of her own self-importance.
It’s not an easy task to portray so many characters and develop each of their stories within the time allowed for a stage play, and the set design and stage management do a good job of creating the different scenes with as little disruption as possible – the addition of a chandelier, swapping flowers for a bust statue to indicate the different venues.
The production and performances were spot on as ever with the People’s, and certainly the characters were all skilfully portrayed, but overall the adaptation for me was too disjointed and lacked something of the charm and romance of Austen’s original.
Denise Sparrowhawk
