It is a truth universally acknowledged that a theatre company in need of a decent living must be in want of a classic novel to adapt. Good Company has worked its way through Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Emma and Hard Times; now it reduces Jane Austen's novel to the romantic plotline in an adaptation and production so lacking in wit, and so creaky and long-winded (almost three hours), that you sit open-mouthed, amazed that in the 21st century anyone can still be producing mothball theatre of this kind, or that people pay to see it.
Sue Pomeroy's heavy-handed production has had plenty of column inches because it features former TV presenter John Leslie in the minor role of Wickham, the military bounder who elopes with the silliest of the Bennett girls. The best you can say is that Leslie remembers his lines, and his stiff delivery is not the major acting crime of an evening where many of the performances are either half-baked or totally overdone.
If Mrs Bennett (Rula Lenska, offering up every line with exactly the same vocal inflection and clearly already preparing for the panto season) is a fusspot, it is nothing compared with the fussiness of the production, which has lots of itsy-bitsy dances and itsy-bitsy piano playing, as well as a design so cumbersome that the cast spend as much time rearranging the furniture as they do acting. I haven't seen set changes like this in the professional theatre for years. It is as if those responsible haven't been near a theatre for 20 years, and have no inkling how others from Shared Experience to Complicité have been transposing novels from page to stage.
Nobody comes out of it with any honour, but Sylvester McCoy as the put-upon Mr Bennett comes off best - perhaps because, as he notes in the programme, early in his career he learned "to perform the impossible with total conviction".
· Ends tonight. Box office: 01483 440000. Then touring.
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