IN the summer of 2018 at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, the young, Scottish actor and playwright Isobel McArthur and her ensemble took to the stage with her new, comic adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous novel.
Titled Pride & Prejudice (Sort Of), the piece was performed by a cast comprised entirely of young, female actors, who played in costumes that crashed 19th and 21st-century styles, while being accompanied by carefully selected tracks from the canon of modern popular music.
The adaptation told the famous story of Elizabeth Bennet’s troubled romance with Fitzwilliam Darcy from the perspective of the servants in the novel. Female actors (and even props) played the male roles (McArthur herself performed the part of Darcy, as well as that of Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs Bennet).
All-in-all, McArthur’s satirical take on the novel – which was originally directed by Paul Brotherston – was about as far from Joe Wright’s 2005 film (featuring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen amid a star-studded cast) as it was possible to get. The Scottish critics – for the most part – loved it.
A London West End transfer followed. So, too, did rave reviews from the London critics (and Stephen Fry), followed by a Best Comedy gong in the prestigious Olivier Awards for 2022.
Now, more than four years after its Glasgow premiere, the play is returning to Scotland. The show plays dates at Her Majesty’s
Theatre, Aberdeen (October 13-15);
the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (October 18 to November 5); and
the King’s Theatre, Glasgow (November 7-12) as part of a far-ranging British tour.
When I catch up with McArthur, she is ensconced in her Cornish bolthole, where she is staying courtesy of the Minack Theatre. The massive success of her Pride & Prejudice has, she comments, been a very pleasant surprise.
The dramatist would, she says, “never have believed” that a commission to write a play for a two-week run at the Tron would become an award-winning smash hit in London. She penned the piece as a young writer under the aegis of the Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland mentorship scheme.
McArthur had felt very fortunate, she tells me, to have landed both the mentorship and the Tron commission at the same time. She didn’t dream of the laurels to come.
When the Tron’s artistic director Andy Arnold commissioned McArthur to adapt a classic novel for the stage, and Pride and Prejudice was alighted upon, was it her instinct, I wonder, to react against the seemingly ubiquitous costume drama in British TV and cinema? “Absolutely,” the playwright says, emphatically.
“I hadn’t read any Jane Austen at that point,” she acknowledges. “If you’d have asked me if I liked her work, I’d have said I was sure I wouldn’t.”
This certainty, she explains, was shaped to a very great degree by the screen adaptations of the novels of Austen and other 19th-century English writers, from the Bronte sisters to Thomas Hardy. “All of the television programmes and films are so very po-faced compared to the novels themselves.
“That’s what’s so shocking. Whatever echo of an echo of an echo we’re now left with, in terms of the pop cultural baggage attached to Austen, people think it’s deeply serious.”
Encountering Austen’s writing for the first time, with a view to theatrical adaptation, was a revelation, McArthur says.
It was only then that she realised that the author of Sense And Sensibility and Mansfield Park had been done an enormous disservice by British culture in the late-20th and early-21st centuries.
The humourlessness around Austen may well be connected to a certain reverence in influential quarters for a historical period that includes the Napoleonic Wars. It’s a period that is significant in shaping the very idea of “Britishness”.
YET, McArthur observes, the novelist herself can hardly be claimed for those nationalistic values. “Jane Austen herself is not jingoistic,” the dramatist observes.
“She’s socialist and feminist, and really, really funny. If you pick up the book, you go: ‘Oh, I see! This is the appeal. This is hilarious.’
“It’s about things that are totally contemporary and relatable.” Not only that, the playwright adds, “in terms of a lot of the gender imbalance in society, the novel addresses problems that, unfortunately, have not gone away.”
Immersing herself in Pride And Prejudice, McArthur was utterly bemused by the chasm she saw between the reality of the novel and the way it had been presented on screen. “I just thought, ‘I don’t understand it’. How could we have ended up with that 1990s BBC television series or that Keira Knightley film when this is the source material?”
Much has been made of the perceived radicalism of McArthur’s adaptation, in terms of its all-female cast, its playing with and against the conventions of the traditional costume drama and its liberal approach to reworking the text. However, the playwright believes that the tone of her comic rendering of the novel is actually more in-keeping with the essence of Austen’s writing than any of the supposedly “faithful” screen versions.
Much of her play is, she says, “just reinstating the humour that’s there in the original text.” That said, McArthur readily admits that the comic style of her piece was also shaped by the fact that it was to premiere (and, indeed, for all she knew, might only ever play) in Scotland.
“I was also thinking about the fact that the play was going to debut in Glasgow,” she says. “There’s something inherently ‘English’ about Austen, or how we perceive her writing.
“Thinking about the novel, I was so aware that it’s set in a time that’s so defined by manners and divisions of social class. So, the kickback is having the story told by the servants – that’s the main transgression.”
McArthur is pleased that audiences have embraced her adaptation in all of its aspects, including its decidedly 21st-century, feminist humour and its genuine affection for Austen’s writing. The latest Scottish dates seem set to be a successful homecoming.
Touring Scotland, October 13 to November 12. For tour dates, visit: prideandprejudicesortof.com
