Emma
Jane Austen, adapted by Doon Mackichan and Martin Millar
Director: Rachel Moorhead
Questors Theatre in Walpole Park
Star rating: 3.5
Well it may be technically “amateur” but this outdoor production is professionally strong. Moreover, it sparkles with wit and flair, as Jane Austen must if you want to bring it off the page successfully. The blend of Austen’s own words, imagined conversations between author, her nieces and her characters and whacky blasts of the 21st century (the shades-of-Six rap at the opening, for instance) all cohere to make pleasing theatre. It respects the source but isn’t afraid to be innovative with it.
Emma Woodhouse (Caitlyn Vary) is a manipulative and snobby young woman who gets her kicks from trying to arrange marriages for everyone around her, especially the gullible seventeen year old Harriet Smith (Eloise McCreedy – good). Of course it always goes wrong and eventually she realises that she has been suppressing her own love for the man who’s been in her life all along.
Priya Patel is excellent as Jane Austen sharing her story with her family as she writes it. She creates a benign, mischievous personality allowing the story to evolve while retaining control. It’s a neat device and Patel has nailed the essence of Austen. Moreover, she morphs seamlessly and many times into the sensible, avuncular but appealing Mr Knightley simply by changing her voice and standing in a masculine way. It’s very accomplished.
Multi-roling lies at the heart of this adaptation for a cast of eight. And Nick Thomas is wonderful at it, turning some of his quick character changes into part of the comedy. His querulous, health-obsessed, elderly Mr Woodhouse delights as does his country-voiced Robert Martin and the good-looking, apparently sophisticated Mr Elton among other roles. It’s a complicated story with a big cast of characters but the story telling is pretty clear in this version.
Vary, who plays just one role, gets the complexities of the title character – the heroine Jane Austen famously expected no one to like except her – convincingly. And Anoop Jagan, the only other cast member to play just a single role, has huge fun with the dishy but dastardly Frank Churchill. I really like the way this production leans gently and wittily on the occasional sexual innuendo too because of course Austen’s writing, at heart, is all about longing and lust usually fuelled by rampaging teenage hormones.
The first outdoor Questors production since the pandemic, Emma is played on a simple but effective set (by Nikoleta Stefanova) with a pair of brick-like pillars, a chaise longue and a side table. But it is graced by the Pitzhanger museum, the Georgian back of which towers atmospherically over the set and that works nicely. The cast are mic’d so that everything is audible even in a busy public park, although there was a great deal of crackle at the performance I saw and that needs sorting out.
A “straight through” show, Emma runs for one hour and three quarters which is too long. It could, and should, easily be played at 50 minutes each way without loss of impetus.
