An early blast of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance sets the mood of this 21st-century take on Jane Austen’s comedy of manners. Award-winning writer Ava Pickett transplants the fictional village of Highbury to deepest Essex and dials up the modernity, music and laughs. Emma (Amelia Kenworthy) is a serious-minded type, albeit still insufferably self-regarding and judgy. She has just failed her finals at Oxford University and is in a state of emotional meltdown when she returns home to begin meddling in the lives of all around her.
Her sister, Isabella (Jessica Brindle), loves fake tans and Elton (Bobby Lockwood) is an oily estate agent in sockless loafers. Emma’s biggest critic and secret admirer, George Knightley (Kit Young), is a builder and brother to oafish John (Adrian Richards), who is getting married to Isabella. Mr Woodhouse (Nigel Lindsay) is still a widower but also a latter-day Del Boy furtively carrying on with Mrs Bates (Lucy Benjamin), a beautician, while Harriet (Sofia Oxenham), kooky and hapless in love, works in the local Co-op.
The central class switch – from genteel society to estuary England – is an inspired stroke by Pickett but the script is laden with over-familiar Essex tropes, and you wish for the gimlet-eyed observation and texture of Austen’s world above this broadness. Where Pickett’s historical drama 1536, staged at the Almeida theatre, resonated magnificently for our time, this seems strangely old-fashioned in its TV sitcom format, despite the modern updating.
The book’s complex web of goings-on are streamlined, arguably for the better, but characters are gratingly exaggerated. That strips the pathos, so it is hard to feel for them as they contend with various romantic wobbles.
Under Christopher Haydon’s direction, characters run in and out, trip, hide and snog comically. The action edges from social satire, of sorts, to full-on revolving-door farce and clowning, high-pitched and hysterical, in the second half.
The pumping music and lights carry you along while Lily Arnold’s set design of a modern house with a Regency-inflected interior (creams, mint green, elegant stripes) brings subtlety that the script lacks.
Pickett certainly captures the heart of a young, arrogant woman who has a “disposition to think too well of herself”, too. But her talk of patriarchy, feminism and consumerism is not sharp enough to serve as social commentary or satire. Her tips on empowerment are too quickly accepted by Mrs Bates, Harriet and John so that they act in unlikely ways – even within the bounds of a farce. And you do not quite catch the heat and smoulder of George and Emma’s sublimated desire until rather too late.
There are some comic zingers and warm moments, Emma and Harriet’s close female friendship is carefully observed, and Kenworthy and Oxenham make spirited professional stage debuts. The few earnest scenes towards the end are so full of heart, emotion and impactful stillness that they reveal glimpses of what the play might have been beneath its head of froth.