STRATFORD — Gossip travels quickly in Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” a rollicking comedy of manners based on the classic Jane Austen novel of the same name. Perhaps that’s because “gossip” is personified here as five loquacious and super judgy busy bodies, who stick their noses into almost every scene and situation that they can find. They make the tea. They stir the tea. And you best believe that they spill the tea, too.
The addition of this nosy quintet (played by Christopher Allen, Jenna-Lee Hyde, Celia Aloma, Jesse Gervais and Julie Lumsden), serving as a Greek chorus of sorts, is just one of the many ingenious aspects to Hamill’s high society satire, which opened Thursday at the Festival Theatre. It’s a refreshingly irreverent take on the original novel, yet one that maintains every bit of the source material’s dry and sarcastic humour.
Whether you’re an Austen fan or not, if you choose to miss this boisterous new production, I have but two words for you, which I shall borrow from the play’s sororal protagonists: “For shame!”
Though it’s one of the longest shows in this year’s Stratford Festival season, clocking in at roughly two hours and 45 minutes, “Sense and Sensibility” whizzes by at a clipped pace. How Hamill managed to distil a dense, 400-page novel into a play of this sort is a wonder.
Wonderful, too, is director Daryl Cloran’s galloping production. On Dana Osborne’s elegant set, large picture frames and chairs are wheeled on and off the stage. Scenes flow into each other with ease, and go down with the lightness of a pleasing English trifle.
None of that should be taken for granted. A stage adaptation of an Austen novel always has the potential to feel stuffy. After all, so much of the action in her stories takes place in static locations: in a drawing room, a bedroom or around a dining table. In a less imaginative production, the narrative could come across as laboured. But not so here.
Instead, the whirlwind nature of Cloran’s production aptly captures the chaotic lives of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood (Jessica B. Hill and Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane, respectively, with some winning chemistry), two loving and loyal sisters who are joined at the hip, yet possess completely different temperaments.
Their world is only prim and proper on the surface. Dig deeper, and you’ll find a society of backstabbing and sabotage, where gossip mills flourish and the weak only perish. For the Dashwood sisters, surviving means warding off unsuitable suitors, while protecting their own broken hearts when those they admire slip out of their grasp.
As the elder Elinor, the always wonderful Hill fully embodies the “sense” of the title, constantly holding her cards close to her chest and letting her actions be guided only by intellect. Sinclair-Brisbane’s Marianne could not be more of a polar opposite. Driven by her emotions, she wears her heart on her sleeve, both for better or for worse.
Aside from the actors who portray the Gossips and the Dashwood sisters, every performer in this “Sense and Sensibility” plays a dual role, which adds to the production’s heightened physical comedy.
Jade V. Robinson, in her Stratford debut, is exceedingly droll, and steals every scene she’s in as the youngest Dashwood sister, Margaret, pouting her way across the stage. Then, she totally transforms before our eyes into Elinor’s cutthroat rival, Miss Lucy Steele, milking every laugh with an aggressive sneer. Talk about a breakthrough debut performance.
Meanwhile, Thomas Duplessie, in his third season with the company, offers another breakthrough turn as the jittery klutz that is Edward Ferrars, Elinor’s love interest. Then, in the second act, he pulls off a complete 180 when he re-enters as Edward’s self-centred brother, Robert, twirling his moustache and vainly swooshing his hair like a mop.
With the play’s mile-a-minute pacing, I found myself wondering by the top of the second act if Hamill’s script and Cloran’s production could maintain that relentless energy through to the show’s conclusion. Alas, they don’t entirely, with some of that vitality dimming as the play works toward its tidy, happy ending.
Hamill’s adaptation perhaps could have shied away less from some of the darker aspects of Austen’s novel, depicting the grittier parts of life for women of the era. Marianne’s plight, for instance, which is much of the focus of the book’s second half, seems somewhat like a secondary narrative in this retelling.
However, these are all minor nitpicks in an otherwise stellar production — delightfully funny, directed with keen attention to detail and uplifted by a bevy of fine performances. For theatre audiences hungry for a hearty comedy this summer, “Sense and Sensibility” is the production to see.
