REVIEW: Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) is Austen exactly as she ought to be

Hearing Elizabeth and Mrs Bennet repeatedly drop the F bomb is music to the ears of those of us who hated Jane Austen with a passion at school. This is the way it should always have been served up – Pride & Prejudice as Miss Austen really ought to have written it. It’s a world where Elizabeth and Jane can sit and munch Frosties from the packet; a world where the finger food of choice is Wagon Wheels and pineapple hedgehogs. The premise in Isobel McArthur’s genius version is that this is Pride & Prejudice re-enacted by the servants with a healthy disrespect for their seniors – and yet you can see, just as McArthur says, that this is a version which really does respect Austen’s spirit.

It’s just that it updates it and heightens it. Hence we get an Elizabeth who swigs the booze and then lambasts Fitzwilliam Darcy with You’re So Vain (the music is great throughout, by the way). Equally we get a Mrs Bennet who tells Lizzie that Darcy “wouldn’t p*ss on you if you were on fire.”

A cast of just five multi-role with huge energy and skill, and the great thing is that you sense that they are loving it every bit as much as we all are. The big surprise on the night was that the sound was consistently inconsistent and frequently poor. So odd that no one seemed able to do anything about it. It certainly detracted from the show.

Even so Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of), a wonderful mix of respect and disrespect, certainly makes for a great night out. It evens leaves the Austen sceptics among us wondering whether, all these years after leaving school, it might not be time to give Jane Austen another chance.