Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Charlotte Productions – Diverse Attractions, 16th – 21st, 11am

(Preview)

When the title includes the words, Jane Austen’s as a prefix, and you aren’t as up-to-speed with early nineteenth century romantic fiction as you perhaps should be, you may perhaps wonder, ‘Is it the one with Colin Firth in the lake? Or Gwenyth Paltrow and the match-making? I’m sure Kate Winslet was in one – maybe it’s that’. Austen’s novels have rendered themselves so well to adaptation that many of us have grown accustomed to her work without even glancing at a page. But while we may not be familiar with Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, that is the whole point.

This is the first performance by Charlotte Productions, a theatre company whose MO is to produce adaptations of forgotten material, ‘texts that have been lost in the vaults of history’; in this case, Austen’s overlooked early work. The plot revolves around the machinations of the recently widowed Lady Susan – beautiful, enchanting, and without any discernible moral standard – as she calls upon the country home of her late husband’s brother, Mr Vernon, in an attempt to bag herself a new husband and thereby his fortune. She has her eye set on Vernon’s brother-in-law, Reginald de Courcy, but a surprise visit from her daughter, Frederica, throws a spanner in the works. It will take all of Susan’s charm and guile to secure herself a husband in this situation.

The cast are first-rate and do more than justice to the material that Austen’s text affords them. Catherine Urfer delights in the title role, effortlessly alternating between the demure, anguished widow that Lady Susan presents to the public, and the amoral seductress we know her to be in reality. There are impressive comic turns from Tom Martin as the blustering Sir James, and Alex Howard who serves double duty as the decrepit Vernon and roguish Mainwaring. The majority of the show’s laughs, however, come from the exchanges between Lady de Courcy and her daughter Mrs Vernon, played respectively by Emily Streete and Orla Murray. Whether griping about Lady Susan or chiding the long-suffering maid (and Mr Vernon), the pair have excellent comic timing and complement each other well.  Angus Brown and Sarah Howarth play Reginald and Frederica, the two innocents ensnared in Lady Susan’s web of deception. Each brings a measure of congeniality and vulnerability to their parts, engaging the audience’s sympathies and establishing the moral centre of the play.

At a time when more and more adaptations of classic texts are given a modern makeover, Jane Austen’s Lady Susan deserves praise for its attention to Regency period detail. The costumes are superb, as are the sideburns. That also applies to the Regency mannerisms invoked by the characters and the way in which they converse with one another. The adaptation has taken a source text that is comprised mainly of prose, and constructed dialogue between characters which is rich, witty and authentic. Instead of retooling the same old material, like so many similar adaptations, in selecting a little known work by a widely know author, Charlotte Productions has broken new ground, delivering something that is both novel and classic at the same time. There is something new here for both ardent Austen fans and those who only know Pride and Prejudice as a 2005 film starring Keira Knightley. It will be interesting to see what they tackle next.

Diverse Attractions, Riddles Court, running from 16th-21st August, 11am-1pm.

John Gibb