★★★☆☆
There’s fun a-plenty, but when you’re watching Isobel McArthur’s take on Jane Austen it’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Laura Wade’s recent foray into similar territory in her mischievous adaptation of that unfinished Austen novel, The Watsons.
McArthur’s script, mixing bawdy anachronisms with a sprinkling of karaoke-ish pop songs, certainly has its charms, but it’s also excessively padded out. Wade was wittier and sleeker.
Context makes all the difference too. If you were to see this irreverent, all-female comedy on a late night at the Edinburgh Fringe, you would forgive the longueurs and throw yourself into the mosh pit of boozy, raunchy humour. In the West End, the play — directed by McArthur and Simon Harvey and first seen at the Tron in Glasgow — looks slightly ragged and underpowered. Everything could be tightened up just a notch or two.
There is, though, ample compensation in a delightful performance from McArthur herself in the dual roles of Mrs Bennet and Mr Darcy (yes, really). Her matriarch is all northern, salt-of-the-earth bluster and sharp elbows, although she does sob into a tin of Quality Street when her plans begin to unravel. Meanwhile, her gloomy Darcy slopes here and there, emitting studied disdain with the merest hint of a raised eyebrow.
What you get is a below-stairs view of the romantic horse-trading delivered by a clutch of demurely dressed but raucous servants who slip in and out of character so easily that you’re not sure whether you’re watching a genteel comedy of manners or a pub argument in Sauchiehall Street. The language is fruity, and at moments of high emotion the ladies are prone to breaking into modern pop songs. Darcy, for instance, is serenaded with You’re So Vain.
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Eighteenth-century conventions of courtship crash headlong into 21st-century ideas about female empowerment. Tori Burgess, Christina Gordon, Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Meghan Tyler play the Bennet daughters as an entertaining mix of maidens, rebels and drunken slappers. “I can fit my whole fist in my mouth,” is probably not the kind of repartee that Miss Austen would use.
Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s eye-catching set is dominated by a towering staircase stuffed with books. As for the unassuming Mr Bennet, all we see of him is a cloud of tobacco wafting above an empty armchair.
The first half skips by. In the second act, the pace begins to flag. A good 20 or 30 minutes could easily be trimmed from the two-and-a-half-hour running time. Conversely, the songs are given so little room to flourish that they begin to feel random. There are plenty of laughs; the party games just begin to outstay their welcome.
To February 13, prideandprejudicesortof.com