Sanditon, Jane Austen’s final and tragically unfinished novel, has ever been a ripe ground for storytellers and ardent Austen-lovers. Over the decades, it has been a project for eager novelists who think they have the craft to finish her work, and also playwrights who use it as a jumping off point for a narrative.
Alexandra Jorgensen’s one-woman play, Tales of a Jane Austen Spinster, follows the latter path, finding one of her leading heroines, Lilly, summoned to life in the Jane Austen house one evening. Finding herself inexplicably alive, and in want of both an ending and a suitable suitor, she happens upon a mobile phone and a modern-day dating app.
It’s a charming and funny play, held together by the charismatic and endearingly clumsy and bumbling performance of Jorgensen. It does feel a little on the flimsy side, however, with low-hanging fruit jokes about unsolicited dick-pics and other perils of dating apps and nights out going badly, feeling a few years past their prime.
The play also ran surprisingly under the time allocated, which makes the quite sudden finale feel all the more abrupt. Yet, it’s kind, fun and rather elegant for all its brevity, and points towards a good future for Jorgensen as a playwright and an actress in broader, lengthier, more complex plays to come.