What a whirligig of talent there is in the Orange Tree’s Northanger Abbey. Of all kinds: writing, acting, directing. Skittering, parodying, excavating, bouncing lightly on ribboned shoes. Yet what eventual seepage of energy, not because too little is on offer but because too much is going on in too many directions – and for too long.
Zoe Cooper is not the first dramatist to unbutton Jane Austen’s verbal bodice. Three years ago Isobel McArthur brilliantly lit up the stage by bringing class consciousness and karaoke to the Bennet family and their servants in Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Still, Cooper must be the first to queer the bonneted one on stage. She is not saying that Austen’s early novel – usually thought of as the account of an ingenue’s awakening and a satire on gothic fiction – is actually all gay, but responding to a particular thread of feeling. The vivacity of Tessa Walker’s production shows she is on to something.
Three actors gender-jumble the action. Rebecca Banatvala mainly sticks to being heroine Catherine Morland – candid and appealing, with poke bonnet and wide, flashing eyes. AK Golding shifts in seconds from being a pipe-smoking pater (“Harrumphh”) to a shrewd and shiny Isabella Thorpe (Iz), one of those dodgy glamourpusses Austen paints with so much gleam, while ostensibly disapproving. She is more than plausible as Cath’s love magnet: if anything, Cooper is softer on her than Austen is, turning a hectic, sentimentalised attachment to sexual attraction (no more than a kiss is seen, but there is talk of entwined limbs). Sam Newton has a particularly good time. At one moment he is Cath’s mother, explaining she’s going to nip up a precarious ladder to pick cherries, do some coppicing and “then I shall have a baby”. At the next he is the unnerving sister of the supposed hero Henry Tilney: wandering around Northanger Abbey as hatchet-faced as Mrs Danvers, with cropped hair, a sugar-pink dress and an obsession with buckets.
Hannah Sibai’s design multitasks as energetically as the characters. Piled-up cases serve as a carriage (a sulky Cath has to be prompted to bounce up and down to show the horses are moving); a table doubles as a bed (knocked on to demonstrate its softness); a model of Northanger Abbey, with turrets and fir trees, is whipped out of a trunk. Everything and everyone is on the move, changing, making themselves up. Heroine Cath eventually turns into the author of her own story.
There are eventually too many double-takes, with Cooper’s underminings and alternative outcomes overlaid on Austen’s glinting satires: it is as if the action were being viewed while wearing specs on top of contact lenses. The fleet pace slackens. Still, the important thing is the production’s vitality. Cooper is particularly shrewd about the shadowy hero, also played by Newton, who displays such an astonishing interest in – almost obsession with – muslin: an early chat-up line has him worrying that Catherine’s sprigged material may not wash well, then gently wittering that if it frays it could be made into a cap. Or a hankie. Or a cloak. You might think he was a girl.
The 21st century swings easily into the 19th, sometimes overlapping in jargon: startlingly, in the novel Austen refers to the “delightful habit of journaling”. Northanger Abbey may not tread the Empire line but it will make readers and audiences think twice and hear better. Suddenly the heroine’s longing for excitement does not sound merely like a wish for social life. On press night a sympathetic roar greeted her exclamation: “I find myself longing for BALLS!”
The Most Precious of Goods is above all an act of commemoration. Jean-Claude Grumberg’s play, translated and directed by Nicolas Kent, was staged in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, which marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. Grumberg’s father and grandparents were deported from Paris in 1942 and died in the camps.
Samantha Spiro narrates this warning disguised as fiction, seated like a granny telling a bedtime story: “There was a woodcutter and his wife…” The far-away-and-long-ago folktale simplicity makes the clarity of its 20th-century events the starker. This tale of persecution, flight, death, love and asylum is centred on a Jewish baby passed by her father through the window of a train headed to a camp: she is taken in, sheltered and adored by a stranger.
Kent, the theatre’s pre-eminent chronicler of 20th- and 21st-century catastrophe and reckoning, stages the fable in distilled form. Spiro narrates crisply, without emotive wobbles, occasionally running through her fingers a white embroidered prayer shawl. Alongside her, the cellist Gemma Rosefield emits touches of period detail, inner atmosphere and precise sound effects: a lullaby, a hint of the Marseillaise, the rattle of a train, eldritch gibbers from a sinister wood. Behind the two women are long columns of concentration camp numbers and black-and-white images: a briar-tangled wood, a line of railway tracks, footprints in snow. The monochrome is an indication of time, mood and a moral certainty. The evening is more rapt than urgent. Yet at the end there is a sudden swerve, as fairytale meets fake news. Is what she has told us true, Spiro asks? Of course not. All invented. There were of course no camps, no deaths.
Star ratings (out of five)
Northanger Abbey ★★★★
The Most Precious of Goods ★★★
