Persuasion
(Picture: Andy Paradise)Jane Austen is the undisputed queen of the kind of suppressed urges, snatched meetings and longing glances that fill Bridgerton Season 2. But what if her characters acted the way they felt? In director Jeff James’s ruthlessly 21st-century retelling of Persuasion, if our protagonist Anne (Sasha Frost) likes someone, she doesn’t just flutter her hands modestly, she snogs them. If she’s fed up with them, she pushes them off the back of the stage (sometimes, they bounce back up again on a concealed trampoline). Diehard Janeites might well be horrified.
Or, equally, they might well find a lot to like in this bold and boisterous update. It sticks closely to the outlines of Austen’s original story, but colours them in with neon instead of sepia: designer Alex Lowde’s set is a nightclub-like concoction of bright blue latex and strip lighting. Some of the updates are wry: “Bath is quite blighted by modern architecture”, says Anne, explaining why she hates her family’s new home. And some are blunter, like the blisteringly surreal dance breaks to songs like Robyn’s Dancing on my Own or Cardi B’s WAP.
It’s all part of James’s agenda, which is to ditch the Regency twee in favour of something just short of nightmarish. Anne’s rivals in love, the Musgroves (Matilda Bailes and Caroline Moroney), are like the twins from The Shining, moving in creepy unison to menace her hopes of happiness. Her unwanted suitor Mr Elliot (Adam Deary) rears up before her like a shark, staring her down with the unabashed confidence of a man who’s used to getting what he wants. Anne and her true love Wentworth (Fred Fergus) are two still points of normality in a world that’s superficial and sinister by turns.
This staging exposes the brutality of being a woman in Regency times, where marriage is a business decision and looks have monetary value (Anne is constantly told she’s “haggard” at the age of 27). But underneath the cynicism, there’s also some serious heart, enough for Anne’s eventual and inevitable happy ending to get some “awwws” from a swooning audience.
For all its modern trappings, this staging only exposes, rather than interrogates, the retrograde gender politics of Austen’s story, and sometimes that’s frustrating. Don’t these female characters deserve more than a life of sipping tea and simpering over their husbands? But what it lacks in 21st-century feminism, Persuasion more than makes up for in fun. It’s chaotic, it’s messy, and it’s probably the only Austen staging ever to feature a riotous foam party and voguing in a gimp suit - it’s hard not to love it for that.
