Jane Austen’s slim oeuvre has an odd place in the literary and filmic canon: readers tend to fall passionately in love with it when they are too young to understand how barbed and ambivalent its worldview is beneath the sprigged muslin. So it is both fun and appropriate to see her early novel given a fanfic makeover by Zoe Cooper of the sort that has previously seen Harry Potter copping off with Ron Weasley. Janeites, be warned.
The first act of this three-hander is a delight, tracking the progress of the breathy young northerner Cath, from her birth in a hard-pressed household, overburdened with babies, to the dizzy social whirl of Bath, where she is whisked by childless friends of the family, with only her intimate knowledge of gothic literature to guide her through the baffling social hierarchies. There she meets the free-spirited and charismatic Iz and Hen, handsome heir to a leaky and undoubtedly haunted castle.
The physical storytelling of Tessa Walker’s production is clear and hilarious, building a world from a few pieces of furniture. A pile of old trunks serves as the coach and horses with which Iz’s boneheaded brother nearly gallops Cath to her death, and a dressing-up box, from which emerge scraps of character, including a regimental jacket that is tossed between Cath, Hen and Iz to populate ballrooms and streets with predatory men.
The problems emerge in the second act, where a tricksy chronology becomes too clever by half, so you are never quite sure if you are in Austen’s head or Cooper’s. Given that Isabella Thorpe is one of the novel’s great disappointments, who disappears off to richer pastures halfway through it, the romance between Iz and Cath cannot resolve, with the result that the story sputters out like a damp candle on a staircase to nowhere.
But there is no faulting the cast. Rebecca Banatvala creates a Cath who fizzes with bright-eyed, charismatic ardour; AK Golding’s Iz has a truly Austenite satirical edge, which makes a mockery of her harrumphing men, even as she conjures them bodily out of thin air; Sam Newton’s honest-to-goodness Hen holds the important line between dignity and send-up from his first appearance as Cath’s labouring mum, giving birth to a large bolster cushion on a mothy chaise longue. It’s a shame the play doesn’t quite manage to gather these dazzling parts into a fully satisfying whole.
• At the Orange Tree theatre, London, until 24 February. Then at Octagon theatre, Bolton, 1-23 March; Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, 27 March-13 April; and Theatre By the Lake, Keswick, 27 April-17 May. Available on demand, 21-24 May.
