It is a truth universally acknowledged that a theatre in want of audiences will eventually find another Jane Austen novel to exploit. Full credit, therefore, to adaptor and director Tim Luscombe for avoiding the more obvious titles and staging a slighter, earlier work that transfers more felicitously to the stage.
Northanger Abbey is more broadly satirical and less finely nuanced than Austen's acknowledged masterpieces, yet these are the qualities that translate best for dramatic treatment. Luscombe's giddy, headlong production takes its tone from the heroine's impatience. Awkward debutante Catherine Morland always has her nose in a book - the more ravishingly horrid the better - but only "as long as they are all action and no tedious reflection".
Conveniently for the dramatist, the book neatly divides into two halves - the first describes Catherine's social round in Bath where she meets the charming Tilneys; the second involves her stay as their house guest at Northanger Abbey. If there's a criticism to be made of the adaptation, it perhaps takes one turn around the Pump Room too many - it's at Northanger, where Catherine's bookish imagination takes a morbid turn, that the real action and hilarity lies.
The performances illustrate many of Austen's mature themes in their formative stages. Jenni Maitland's excitable, saucer-faced Catherine is an early try-out for Marianne Dashwood; while there is a Knightley-ish display of tolerant good sense from Freddie Stevenson as her amiable suitor Henry. Excellent support too from Susan Bovell as guarrulous chaperone Mrs Allen, a picture of disappointment when she declares that her tailor has not called: "I did so wish him to have a look at my old muff and tiffet."
· Until June 12. Box office: 01904 623568.
