I think I realised the route this adaptation of a novel that reached its 250th anniversary this year was to take when I noticed that the rather formal-sounding string quartet piece playing the audience to their seats was actually "True" by Spandau Ballet.
This was carried through to the incidental music in the production, with string arrangements of classic '80s and '90s pop hits such as "Don't You Want Me" by the Human League, "There She Goes" by The La's, "Country House" by Blur (when they get to Darcy's country house), "Why Does It Always Rain On Me" by Travis (when it... you get the picture), even straying into the early 2000s with "Don't Cha" by The Pussycat Dolls. The romantic ending plays out to Elton John's "Your Song" with a bit of piano creeping in (Sonum Batra is credited as composer and musical director so presumably responsible, but there isn't much information in the flimsy programme).
This combination of the old and the new is inherent in the production, both in the dialogue from Kate Hamill and in the lively portrayals of the characters by the cast. The Bennet sisters in particular come across as modern young women in the way they speak and behave, but, while they push a little at the boundaries their society has set for them, their ambitions for life are largely those they have been told they should have, at least by the end. However, class snobbery does come in for satirical attack, especially as personified by Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Jessica Ellis), a forerunner perhaps of Wilde's Lady Bracknell and Wodehouse's aunts, fawned over by the unpleasant preacher Mr Collins (Ben Fensome), who believes the Bennet family to be too far below her to be worthy of marriage to one of her relatives.
The Bennet sisters are Rosa Hesmondhalgh's Elizabeth, the oldest who has said she will never marry, Aamira Challenger's Jane, the 'pretty' one who falls for handsome Mr Bingley played by Eve Pereira, who is also Mary, the bookish one with an annoying cough whom everyone else makes fun of and who, when asked to play something on the piano at a party, opts for Chopin's "Funeral March", and finally Jessica Ellis as 14-year-old Lydia, naïve but a bit of a whirlwind who drains the punchbowl at the ball and jumps into an inadvisable coupling thinking she has 'won' over her sisters by being the first to marry.
The girls are wrangled in their marriage search by Joanna Holden's shrill and annoying but ultimately well-meaning Mrs Bennet, whose husband, played as laid-back and lovable by Dyfrig Morris, tries to keep things calm while staying out of 'women's business', until he finds he needs to take charge and sort things out. The cast is completed by Kiara Nicole Pillai as both Charlotte Lucas and Caroline Bingley.
Sensible Elizabeth runs into James Sheldon's aloof Mr Darcy early on, believing him to be arrogant and unpleasant, confirmed by Mr Wickham's (Ben Fensome) stories about him and more so, it seems to her, when she finds he was instrumental in keeping Jane and Bingley apart. But ultimately, she finds she is wrong about Darcy, and very wrong to trust Wickham, and... well if you can't guess the ending, have a look at the photos on this page for a clue.
The production is very much played for laughs, with some scenes becoming pure farce, though, unlike a lot of the many literary adaptations we have seen recently at the Octagon, the humour comes from—and contributes to—the telling of the story rather than from actors dashing about changing costumes and playing multiple characters. Lotte Wakeham's production is fast-moving for most of the two and a half hours, but slows down appropriately for the more tender moments.
I don't know what a Jane Austen expert would make of it, but Hamill's adaptation works perfectly well as a standalone play without requiring any knowledge of the source, and the Octagon's UK première of this script is just a lot of fun from beginning to end.