Isobel McArthur is recalling the development of her Olivier-award winning Jane Austen adaptation, Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). She had a hunch that Mr Bennet, patriarch of the novel’s family, had little dramatic function. So little, in fact, that she wondered if he was needed at all. “He’s so ineffectual,” she says. “He never says anything useful. So I thought, ‘He could just be played by a chair.’” Thus her Mr Bennet was played by an armchair, a decision that not only expressed his emotional repression but created a funny running joke.
Throw in a few jukebox pop tunes and a rough-and-ready sensibility, and you see how that show led to McArthur’s debut as writer and director at the RSC. Tasked with reinvigorating The Fair Maid of the West, she has respected the structure of Thomas Heywood’s 17th-century romp, keeping phrases she thought were “very beautiful” – but she has not held back in making it her own. “It’s quite a major departure,” says McArthur, who also adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped for the National Theatre of Scotland and wrote her original comic fantasia, The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, for Edinburgh’s Traverse this summer.
“Maybe we all think the audience is going to be full of mothbally academics frowning at their Heywood texts, going, ‘Changed that bit, changed that bit.’ But people will realise they are not going to see a faithful Heywood interpretation. Like lots of old things, there’s brilliance and it’s also flawed. It has to be the play we need for today.”
Heywood’s two-part play, published in 1631, recounts the escapades of Bess Bridges – renamed Liz in McArthur’s adaptation – a young woman who works behind the bar of a Plymouth pub, where she attracts the attention of a few too many passing soldiers. Her tavern is a stopping-off point for them, before their perilous journeys to the Azores, Spain and north Africa in the late 16th-century Anglo-Spanish war. Believing her fiance to have died in action, she takes to the seas herself to reclaim his body.
“What we’re looking at here,” says McArthur of Heywood, “is someone who had a lot of good ideas, but had the remit of writing a load of thinly veiled praise for Queen Elizabeth I, who he modelled his central character on. We take a more critical look at the behaviour of the royals, colonialists and merchants, and how that behaviour of going out and stealing doesn’t benefit the whole of society. The poor are still exceedingly poor, left to make sense of their lot.”
Where the original character was intrepid, even as she complied with social norms, McArthur brings a more questioning spirit. She is relishing the way RSC regular Amber James is playing Liz with a “presence and authority that in no way diminishes her ability to be playful”, in a production that considers male mental health alongside community, compromise and compassion.
“There is such an interesting set of so-called female virtues at that point in history,” says McArthur. “The character in Heywood’s original is physically and verbally abused, psychologically manipulated, lied to and doesn’t so much as shed a tear or raise her voice. There is a dangerous form of wonky feminism whereby women are stopped from being human – like in Marvel movies where they chuck in a female character who looks great in a catsuit but is unaffected by everything around her. I’d like to reach for some kind of equality, where we’re all flawed and multidimensional, and make the right decisions sometimes and the wrong ones other times.”
The play was last staged by the RSC for the Swan theatre’s 1986 opening season, in a production by Trevor Nunn starring Imelda Staunton and Sean Bean. Now, as then, the play has a rough popular energy. “What is exciting is the play is almost exclusively set in working-class spaces,” says McArthur, who is turning the theatre into a pub complete with cabaret tables modelled on those in the Laurieston bar in Glasgow’s Gorbals.
“The soundtrack is evocative of a childhood pub jukebox, when we were sat in the corner with pop and crisps while our dads played darts. We’re trying to tease out a nostalgia for these old pub spaces before gentrification or chains took over – your actual local at the heart of a community, which is really central to Celtic culture in the 20th century.”
McArthur makes a Celtic link between her own home in Scotland, the Irish roots of composer Michael John McCarthy, and the south-west English coast where the play is set. “It’s got to be evocative of pubs we’ve known in our own lifetimes, and of this maritime passing place,” she says. “And we have this complex working-class central character in a play about social justice, fairness and morality. People say this is theatre that is ‘radical’, ‘mischievous’ or ‘irreverent’. All anybody really means is that it’s not pretending one half of us are better than the other. There’s no sense of starchy formality. The remit is to make a thing people might not think is for them, clearly for them.”
The Fair Maid of the West is at Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 2 December to 14 January
