This smartly playful adaptation of Jane Austen’s first completed novel is a purist’s nightmare, but I reckon Austen would thoroughly approve. Playwright Zoe Cooper merges the author with her heroine Catherine Morland and suggests that perhaps the book’s real romance lies between Catherine and her best friend Isabella, rather than her ostensible beau Henry, with his fastidious manners and interest in women’s fashion.
It’s performed by three wryly charming actors deftly chopping and changing roles on a hot-pink stage, with little more than trunks and chandeliers as props. Yet it asks big, clever questions about personal agency, authorship and control. The script switches between first and third person narratives and different time periods and tenses: I had to look up what turned out to be the Future Perfect.
