Isobel McArthur’s “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of),” now receiving an encore run at Mirvish’s CAA Theatre following its sold-out North American premiere in 2023, opens not, as you might expect, with a portrait of the Bennet family and its central protagonists, sisters Elizabeth and Jane, but rather with a quintet of servants, decked out in yellow cleaning gloves and each wearing a mischievous smile.
As the show begins, one servant enters the stage from a loo, flaunting a toilet plunger that appears to be covered with some … scatological material.
Over at the Stratford Festival, the American playwright Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” starts with a similarly humorous and jarring picture: a corpse is dropped from the rafters of the Festival Theatre and crashes onto the stage with a heavy thud. The body, we soon discover, belongs to the late father of sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood (Jessica B. Hill and Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane, respectively), who must quickly learn, with the help of each other, how to navigate a world filled with a host of suitable — and unsuitable — suitors.
If Jane Austen were still alive today, I wonder if she’d be appalled or bemused by the irreverent tone of these two theatrical adaptations.
On one hand, both McArthur and Hamill clearly understood their assignments: in order to successfully translate any Austen novel for the stage, you must maintain her sense of humour. Anything less would result in an adaptation that feels stuffy and spiritless — which the English author’s writing is anything but.
Austen’s wit, however, doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being translated across artistic mediums. Instead, her humour feels tailor-made for the page. It’s dry and mockingly sarcastic, with irony woven into her prose. Her comedy is always grounded in realism, not farce. Another one of its key attributes: it eschews superfluous visual descriptions for wit borne out of social situations. In fact, Austen rarely paints much of a picture of what her characters look like.
This all poses a challenge to playwrights hoping to adapt Austen for the stage. While books are a medium of the written word, the theatre is a medium of the spoken word. And often, stage comedy originates as much from the text as it does from the visual pictures created in the production.
McArthur and Hamill take two vastly different approaches to translating Austen’s sense of humour for the theatre. And both shows succeed, in their own unique ways.
McArthur’s retelling of “Pride and Prejudice,” which premiered in Scotland in 2018 and has since played in London’s West End, leans into the idea that Austen’s works are inherently social class satires that can be presented as farces.
Her adaptation is told from the perspective of five female servants (played by Emma Rose Creaner, Eleanor Kane, Rhianna McGreevy, Naomi Preston Low and Christine Steel) all living and working on the Bennet estate. In this play-within-a-play, these servants all take turns playing the various characters in Austen’s story.
The humour itself is very much in the vein of Monty Python. Just one example: when Jane travels on horseback to visit the wealthy young bachelor Charles Bingley, the cast trot out a pair of coconuts (a direct nod to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) to simulate the sound of the horse’s hooves. And when Jane rides this (very fake) horse, her hair dramatically blowing in the wind, she belts out Etta James’ “At Last.” You get the gist. The brand of comedy here is one of relentless silliness.
Hamill’s adaptation, by contrast, is less of a screwball comedy than McArthur’s play. If the humour in “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)” is absurd and especially bawdy, the tone of the Stratford Festival’s “Sense and Sensibility” is lighter, slyer and also more physical.
Many of the laughs in Hamill’s play come from her ensemble of so-called Gossips, five loquacious and prying characters who dip in and out of the action, and whose quips and spicy commentary are woven into the narrative.
In this particular production, now running at Stratford’s Festival Theatre, director Daryl Cloran also finds comedy in character doubling. Except for actors who play the Gossips and the eldest Dashwood sisters, every other performer plays at least two roles.
Jade V. Robinson, for instance, is utterly hilarious as the youngest Dashwood sister, pouty Margaret, before transforming before the audience’s eyes into Miss Lucy Steele, Elinor’s cutthroat nemesis. Similarly, standout Thomas Duplessie initially appears as the skittish Edward Ferrars, Elinor’s love interest who looks like a frightened cat just thrown into a pool of water, before returning later in the play as Edward’s vain brother, Robert, swishing his hair with an air of pompousness.
Both “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)” and “Sense and Sensibility” are equally entertaining, though I was more impressed by Hamill’s ability to balance both humour and heart in her adaptation.
As for McArthur’s play, there’s no doubt that its style of comedy might be too brash for some. For me, it certainly took some time to get used to. I also wished McArthur made more use of her framing with the five servants, to better explore the theme of class dynamics.
What these two shows fundamentally demonstrate, however, is the sheer range of comedy that can appear onstage and how the works of a single author, with a distinct style that’s consistent across her oeuvre, can be transformed into a pair of theatrical works more different in their temperaments than Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.
