Jane Austen
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life review - persuading us that the French can do you-know-whoFriday, 13 June 2025
Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year –... Read more... |
The Potato Lab, Netflix review - a K-drama with heart and witMonday, 24 March 2025
When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the... Read more... |
Mansfield Park, Guildhall School review - fun when frothy, chugging in romantic entanglementsTuesday, 04 March 2025
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also very much in favour of Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with a neatly telescoped and often witty... Read more... |
Being Mr Wickham, Jermyn Street Theatre review - the plausible, charming roué gives his version of events 30 years onTuesday, 11 June 2024
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still... Read more... |
Northanger Abbey, Orange Tree Theatre review - larky retelling of Austen’s satire with a poignant coreFriday, 26 January 2024
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen’s first completed novel looks at first sight like a knockabout satire of a satire. But her aim is more sober than that: a queer rereading of this text as she first experienced it as... Read more... |
Mansfield Park, RNCM, Manchester review - bringing out the bestWednesday, 29 March 2023
Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that kind where you have a smallish number of performers, no chorus, and the “set” is simply the rooms and furnishings of a gracious residence from an age gone by.Accompaniment was originally... Read more... |
Persuasion, Alexandra Palace Theatre review - graphic-novel-style AustenThursday, 14 April 2022
Jane Austen’s waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinned most of the relationships of her day. The element in which she thrived was repression; the heart constrained beneath the corset, the... Read more... |
Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of), Criterion Theatre review - bursting with wit, verve, and loveThursday, 04 November 2021
“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).... Read more... |
Being Mr Wickham, Original Theatre Company online review - an uncontroversial apologiaTuesday, 04 May 2021
It wasn’t Jane Austen’s subtlest move, naming her roguish soldier George Wickham. As countless GCSE English teachers have patiently read in generations of essays, his surname sounds a lot like "wicked" – and wicked he is. Adrian Lukis, who played... Read more... |
The Watsons, Menier Chocolate Factory review - Laura Wade's inventive new playTuesday, 01 October 2019
What a joy Laura Wade's latest play is. Transferring from its successful run at the Minerva Theatre at Chichester last year, The Watsons is developed from Jane Austen's unfinished novel (started in 1804 and abandoned the following year). But rather... Read more... |
'In order to write my book I had to kill Jane Austen'Sunday, 11 March 2018
My heroine would not have appeared in a Jane Austen novel. Brilliant, arch and incisive though Austen was – as deft in dissecting the economics of romance as in laying bare the lies told by the human heart – for better or worse, she still sent all... Read more... |
'Fanny Price’s pained silences gave me the impulse to write music for her'Saturday, 16 September 2017
When I first read Mansfield Park, some 30 years ago, I heard music. That doesn’t always happen when I read, and it certainly didn’t happen when I read other novels by Jane Austen. There is something about this particular book that provoked musical... Read more... |
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