Pride & Prejudice (sort of) is a blast

Pride & Prejudice (sort of)

at the Oxford Playhouse

from Monday, March 10, to Saturday, March 15

Review by JON LEWIS

THE Oxford Playhouse celebrated the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth with Isobel McArthur’s jolly revival of her adaptation of Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, the (sort of) in the title symbolising the production’s irreverent take on the novel’s formality. The production, originally co-produced by the Playhouse, toured to the venue just before lockdown in 2020, and subsequently won an Olivier award for best comedy.

With every performance sold out, this is a feelgood version of a familiar classic. On a book-themed set (designer, Ana Inés Jabares-Pita), an excellent cast of five play all the roles beginning as the servants of the various country houses in the novel who then enact Austen’s story. The servants point out that Austen neglected their stories even though they are ever present and have seen all the major characters naked.

The fun is evident in every scene. Pop songs permeate the production that are cleverly chosen to comment on characters or plot developments. When Lizzie Bennet (Naomi Preston Low) wants to humiliate her admirer Darcy (Rhianna McGreevy) at a society party she croons pointedly a cover of Carly Simon’s hit You’re So Vain, and then when she rejects his proposal some time later, she does it singing Bonnie Tyler’s I Need a Hero.

It’s a nice touch when Darcy’s overbearing aunt Lady Catherine de Burgh (Christine Steel, whose main role is Jane Bennet) boasts that her cousin Chris has written a new song – the Lady in Red – which is then belted out. The songs add a vital freshness and an amicable relatability to the characters so that they are not stuck in the early 19th century.

The jokes come fast and loose, often when characters swear like troopers. Some lines only hit home a few seconds after delivery, such as the retort that ‘the baby Jesus will be spinning in his grave’. The cast is completed by Emma Rose Creaner, as the Bingham siblings Charles and Charlotte, and Eleanor Kane (playing the neglected middle sister Mary).

Faithful to Austen’s sharp observations about the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives in Regency England, the show’s a blast.