The Complete Jane Austen Collection (Sort of)

BUM ON A SEAT REVIEWS

This brand new show from Tread The Boards, written by Emma Ingleton, Ash Bayliss, and Catherine Prout, is clearly influenced by the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) with its revue-like structure, even the onstage bickering of the actors.  Here though, instead of the Bard, it’s the works of celebrated novelist Jane Austen that are being condensed and parodied.  It’s Austen’s 250^th birthday year and if you can’t roast someone on their birthday, when can you?

We have an expert (Rosie Coles) keen to transmit her appreciation of Austen’s novels to us.  Unfortunately, the other two cast members, Emily Tietz and John-Robert Partridge, are far from keen.  Their views on the novels can be summed up with a four-letter word that rhymes with spit.

A PowerPoint presentation rushes us through the key points of Austen’s life – not all of which can be believed.  The lesson here is don’t get A.I. to do your research!  Then we launch into a whistlestop tour of the books, some of which may be more familiar than others.  I don’t want to spoil the many surprises and pop culture references that form the backbone of the show’s humour.  Suffice it to say there are wigs, costume changes, a lot of dashing around, and plenty of satire, some of it rather acute.

Ostensibly (Austensibly?) taking the lead, Rosie Coles channels Julie Walters for a consistently funny performance.  Emily Tietz, a Tread The Boards favourite, has comedy written through her like Blackpool through a stick of rock, while Mr Tread The Boards himself, John-Robert Partridge demonstrates his versatility for broad caricatures and outlandish accents.

All three are talented when it comes to physical comedy, and they play a wide range of characters with indefatigable energy and gusto.  Perhaps they should cut down on the number of times they tell us what they’re doing is ‘shit’, when quite clearly, it isn’t.

Some of the jokes land better than others, but that doesn’t matter because there’ll be another one along in a second.

Even though the show posits that Austen’s books are all essentially the same, director Ash Bayliss ensures that each one is given different treatment, with its own atmosphere and its own energy.  The lighting and sound (designed by Kat Murray) are an equal part of proceedings.  The timing is spot on throughout.

Played out in front of Hattie Human’s elegant Regency-inspired set, complete with silhouette portraits of the cast, this is a hugely amusing show with many laugh-out-loud moments.  It’s the kind of thing that would go down a storm at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

You don’t have to know anything about Jane Austen to be able to appreciate the daftness of the enterprise.  If you do know anything about Jane Austen, you’ll appreciate how clever the daftness is....

A fun night out with a trio of top drawer performers who go all out to earn the laughs.

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

 

ELEMENTARY WHATS ON

Many people have seen the film or television versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, but how many people have read more than a couple of Jane Austen’s novels – or even one?  Limited by having just three actors, including Tread the Boards regulars John-Robert (JP) Partridge and Emily Tietz, Rosie Coles, Austen aficionado, did her best to bring gravitas and authenticity to an evening of Jane Austen novels.  What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, only Rosie had read any Austen novels, and she had recruited two actors who were less than enthusiastic about her project. JP was openly scathing about the shallowness and repetitive nature of the plots, whilst Emily was hoping for the best roles for herself. The writing team of Emma Ingleton, Ash Bayliss and Catherine Prout gave this full house an hilarious run through of all of the Austen novels, transforming serious and emotionally intense literature into side splitting comedy.

JP gave a clever slide presentation of Jane Austen’s life, with numerous malapropisms and anachronisms, to get the show underway.  Each novel only had the skeleton of the story because the dialogue and characters were portrayed using examples from modern TV programmes such as Rosie’s impersonation of Cilla Black in a dating game show.  Traitors and Made in Chelsea each got a scene.  JP appeared as Elton John using his song titles as part of his dialogue.

All the cast did well in the dance routines, which were very varied, almost none of which were appropriate for the Austen era and which made the scenes even more humorous. In Sense and Sensibility, Emily and JP danced to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights before Rosie pointed out that was by Emily Brontë, not Jane Austen.

 The whole evening was pantomime by another name intertwined with very clever farce.  There was a boo-hiss pantomime scene with JP holding hand puppets behind a screen, while Rosie encouraged the audience to support her, and an Ossie Osborne character made an appearance.  There was a lot of innuendo but much of the script was very witty.  Rosie gave Emily and JP the challenge of performing Mansfield Park in three minutes before the interval, which of course the three of them succeeded in doing with a superb hyperactive interchange of roles and taking turns to explain the plot.

After the interval, the focus was on Austen’s best-known work, Pride and Prejudice. JP of course thought he was going to be Darcy, but Rosie had recruited Colin Firth… as a life size cardboard cutout.  The interactions of Emily as Elizabeth Bennett with the cardboard Firth, and the disappointed JP giving deadpan responses as Firth, reading the script from the back of the cutout, were hysterical.  In best pantomime tradition, two reluctant audience members were invited to participate.

Although Austen purists may have been a bit shellshocked, this was a first-rate evening’s entertainment.  Even if, like this reviewer, one knows very little about Austen’s work, this was well worth the price of the ticket and can be highly recommended.