Pride and Prejudice re-boot at Lowry puts laughs into Austen

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) is heading to The Lowry next week as part of a major UK tour having already taken the West End by storm and picking up the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy in the process.

And yes, that was an award for comedy, which may well raise a few eyebrows among those who thinking Jane Austen is all about costumes, social mores of Georgian England and Mr Darcy emerging from a lake.

“Even though I’d studied literature at university, I had never read any Jane Austen,” said Isobel. “I assumed I probably wouldn’t like it as there was all this pop cultural baggage around it. It all seemed quite starchy.

“But I opened it and it was absolutely hilarious. It was just so funny. I couldn’t understand why all the adaptations I was aware of like the BBC’s with Colin Firth were so po-faced. Maybe it’s because they are presented as period dramas but they’ve sucked all the fun out of it.”

Isobel discovered Jane Austen after she was approached by the artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow who said he would be interested in staging a reimagined classic novel.

“I immediately went to the secondhand bookshop below my flat in Glasgow and started looking for the right novel,” said Isobel.

“I knew that I would try to adapt Pride and Prejudice the moment I read it,” she said. “I could see that on the page it’s a comedy from start to finish. I just thought ‘all I need to do is reinstate all these jokes’. Every character is recognisable today, they are people in your family or in your community. I was laughing my head off at the book and thought ‘we’ve got to do it’.”

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) is the novel told by five female servants and incorporates modern pop songs and rubber gloves into the world of Jane Austen.

“I think with classic novels there can be a perception that there’s some kind of intellectual exclusivity about them,” said Isobel. “I wanted to see if I could puncture that idea and make audiences realise that it was a story and a show for them.

“I liked the idea of having the story told by servants. It was an era so preoccupied by notions of class, so by having these working class women be come the heart of the story immediately gets the audience on board.”

Isobel turned to the idea of a Friday night karaoke to make the show even more accessible with classic songs ranging from You’re So Vain to Young Hearts Run Free a key element in the show.

“The selection of songs ranges from hits from the 1960s to the Nineties,” said Isobel, “and it’s fun to see different sections of the audience recognise a song from their era.”

Jane Austen is much loved as an author and Isobel’s reimagining of Pride and Prejudice is so radical you might think that Austen diehards would be almost apoplectic with what she has done with their ‘sacred’ material.

“I’m delighted that Austen fans really like it,” said Isobel. “The only way you can do that is by being true to the source material and loving it yourself and I really do.

“It means so much to see a audiences falling about laughing and I know it’s a direct quote lifted from the novel.

“There’s always a danger with an adaptation that you might start to think that you need to reinvent everything. I’m nowhere near as clever as Jane Austen and as soon as you reconcile yourself with that then you know what you’re doing”

The UK tour will be the first time that Isobel won’t have appeared in the show as well as directing it.

“I’ve finally stood aside and can just be the writer and director only,” she laughed. “I only started writing scripts and directing because I wanted to act and I wrote this play so I could write myself a part in it.”

Given the play’s success, does that mean her acting career is over?

“Oh no, I’m going to inflict some more of my acting on the world,” she said. “It’s a balance for me. Being part of a live performance is the most exciting thing ever done in my life and it’s not something I want to have to give up completely. But I’ve also written two original plays which are going to be announced this year and a couple more adaptations.

“I think the most important thing is that the next thing you do is different enough from the last.”

Having grown up in Withington, Isobel can’t wait for the show to come to The Lowry, a venue which inspired her to become part of the theatre world.

“I remember going to The Lowry and having my socks blown off as teenager by various productions. When I saw Angels in America there I went to the cast afterwards asking if they could you tell me anything about how I might go about doing what they did. It just seemed so impossible then. And now look.

“The great thing about this version of Pride and Prejudice is that you don’t need to have heard of Jane Austen to enjoy it. I’m not interested in bamboozling an audience; if anyone is going to do me the honour of buying tickets to my show, I’m guaranteed to entertain them not distance them from what they are watching.”

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), The Lowry, Salford Quays, Thursday, January 19 to Saturday, January 21. Details from www.thelowry.com