The great thing about Sanditon, the novel Jane Austen was writing when she died, is that it’s unfinished. You can’t complain about people meddling with the plot if it’s unresolved. It’s a near-blank canvas, with a dramatis personae and a backdrop sketched out, for the veteran adapter Andrew Davies to fill in. Indeed the most fully developed character is the town itself – formerly a small village somewhere near Brighton, now a small town with aspirations to trash all its rivals on the south coast.
Tom Parker (Kris Marshall), the town’s unflagging entrepreneur, somehow manages to get the king (the Regent?) to accept an invitation to his concert featuring a black American soprano. In this production, Sanditon is picture perfect, including the Daylesford Organic-style slum. In the old market, even the carrots are clean.
