Isobel McArthur is recalling the development of her Olivier-award winning Jane Austen adaptation, Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). She had a hunch that Mr Bennet, patriarch of the novel’s family, had little dramatic function. So little, in fact, that she wondered if he was needed at all. “He’s so ineffectual,” she says. “He never says anything useful. So I thought, ‘He could just be played by a chair.’” Thus her Mr Bennet was played by an armchair, a decision that not only expressed his emotional repression but created a funny running joke.
Throw in a few jukebox pop tunes and a rough-and-ready sensibility, and you see how that show led to McArthur’s debut as writer and director at the RSC. Tasked with reinvigorating The Fair Maid of the West, she has respected the structure of Thomas Heywood’s 17th-century romp, keeping phrases she thought were “very beautiful” – but she has not held back in making it her own. “It’s quite a major departure,” says McArthur, who also adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped for the National Theatre of Scotland and wrote her original comic fantasia, The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, for Edinburgh’s Traverse this summer.
