A production universally acknowledged…
The Hampstead Players’ Autumn production of Pride and Prejudice
Let us begin, as all good productions do, with the script. There have been countless stage or film adaptations of this most popular of novels, some of them – such are today’s tastes – with modernised words and added improprieties. However, this Hampstead Players’ production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Jane Mayfield in association with Annie Duarte, went back to Jane Austen, directly transcribing the dialogue – those ’gracious, complicated sentences’, as Paul Jennings called them – from the original book. The resulting script, together with the acting style (which for the most part was precise and articulated), Cristina Bancora’s elegant choreography, the specially recorded music, and Margaret Pritchard Houston’s sumptuous costumes, gave exactly the right Regency authenticity.
There are, of course, problems with turning a book into a play. Jane Austen gives us over 60 short chapters, in which characters and locations rapidly alternate. It may be important to follow this pattern in a play, to do justice the book’s complex plot, but it does demand many changes of scene, dangerously interrupting the flow. However, the directors moved the actors quickly from one scene to the next, even as the stage crew toiled away among them, so little continuity was lost.
The original book, of course, is not all dialogue. There is detailed description, much indirect speech, and we are often made party to the characters’ thoughts. The danger in transcribing just the dialogue is that motivational subtlety might be lost. However in this case, the qualities of the acting and production were enough for us to infer what was not explicit in the words. We could actually see the younger Bennet sisters becoming more mature as the play progressed. The dramatised letter-reading scenes, too, were useful ways of transmitting the characters’ thoughts as the plot developed. And we could really see and appreciate the gradual changes taking place in Elizabeth and Darcy as they shed the pride and the prejudices which kept them from each other.
This was a long play, which may well be edited somewhat for the future (and I feel sure it has one), but the energy of the production very seldom flagged. And its admirable aim of completeness was a positive factor: the 22 actors covered almost the whole range of characters in the book. I cannot mention them all, but the Hampstead Players are fortunate to have a group of talented actors able to do justice to a play with such a good gender balance, wide age range and variety of role.
There were many good women’s parts. The three younger sisters came over more vividly than they do in the book itself, a demonstration of how to create a character out of a few lines: Alice Lambert’s Mary, retiring, self-possessed and with an unwitting humour; Jo Siddall as a charming, easily-led Kitty and Mary Clare’s dominating Lydia, at first a lumpish teenager, but blossoming into an eager bride. Rosie Wheat gave us a beautiful but beastly Caroline Bingley and a glacial Bonnie Taylor was the haughty Lady Catherine de Burgh. And at the opposite end of the social scale was Margaret Pritchard Houston as Hill, the Bennets’ delightfully surly servant.
The group of eligible (and not-so-eligible) bachelors included Barney Lyons’ slow but decent and honourable Mr Bingley, just the right partner for Michaela Clement-Hayes’ sweet, good-natured Jane; and Jo Bohling’s splendidly uniformed Mr Wickham, sly and unprincipled, but finally doing the decent thing by Lydia. Matthew Williams gave a lively cameo of the obsequious, socially-inept, Mr Collins, rejected by Elizabeth but (along with his wealth) easily falling prey to Catherine Martin’s warm and sensible Charlotte Lucas.
But the play revolves essentially around two couples, one in a relationship of long standing, the other fitfully emerging. As Mr and Mrs Bennet, Adrian Hughes and Emma Lyndon-Stanford struck exactly the right note: awareness of each other’s shortcomings, but always tolerant and loving, with the suggestion of many years of give and take together. His laconic style contrasted beautifully with her volubility, and his slightly cynical detachment with her frenetic involvement in the matrimonial process.
And what of Elizabeth and Darcy? Many big-name actors and actresses have played these roles, but I doubt if many have come closer to the restrained, yet fully human, Jane Austen style. Jon Waters gave us Darcy’s cold aloofness beautifully: he began detached, a model of sustained disinterest. But gradually we saw his cynicism change to ambivalence, and then to a sincere, understated passion, as he set his personal vanities on one side. In Sarah Day’s performance, we saw Elizabeth’s underlying warmth coming through the surface cynicism. Hers was a humorous Lizzie, intelligently amused at all that went on around her. But her inner strength was there too. Her rejection of the hapless Mr Collins was polite but devastating, her Beatrice-and-Benedick argument with Darcy, the climax of Part One, was a scene of considerable force, and another climax came, this time movingly, when at the end she finally accepted him. What a splendid, if demanding, couple they would make.
The overall style of this well-directed production was not a reverential view of a great classic, nor a steamy modern re-telling. It was the style of the book itself, that of a veritable comedy of manners, played with lightness and humour, but with an underlying seriousness of purpose. I have turned back to the book with a new understanding, and to judge from the large, enthusiastic audiences, others will be doing so too.