Review: Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) at The Lyceum, Sheffield

From Colin Firth to Keira Knightley and Mr Darcy to Mark Darcy, Austen interpretations always enjoy an enduring appeal.

But a theatrical comedy adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with an all-female cast of just five? With booze, fags, swearing… and karaoke?

Surprisingly, it works.

Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) is the latest multi-talented all-women offering, based on fabulous females through history - there’s been Six the Musical, and Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World - to take the Lyceum by storm.

And like both of those brilliant productions this sparkling play is also very different from most things you’ll have seen before.

Written and directed by Isobel McArthur, who also takes on two of the lead roles, it’s bawdy, audacious, irreverent and laugh-out-loud hilarious.

McArthur is hysterical as the Bennet sisters’ permanently plotting, meddling matchmaking mother, and beautifully brooding as the arrogant and aloof Mr Darcy.

Hannah Jarrett-Scott is heartbreaking as Lizzie Bennet’s best friend Charlotte Lucas, deliciously desperate as the awful antagonist Caroline Bingley, and brilliantly bumbling as hapless romantic Mr Bingley.

Lightning fast costume changes and some very clever scripting mean the actors whip in and out of scenes with the same dizzying speed as a reel at a Regency ball.

It’s not long before you forget completely that even the male roles are being played by women.

All five of the actors also play servants, with the opening premise that it always was the lowly female servants - with their behind-the-scenes interventions, perfectly-timed delivery of drinks and notes, their keeping of secrets and changing of bedsheets - who facilitated all the great romances and professional accomplishments in history.

It’s a good feminist idea, in the great tradition of Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare’s sister and a Room of One’s Own.

But as a plot device it’s a little rough around the edges and gives the show the occasional feel of fringe theatre - which is exactly where it started life.

Isobel McArthur first conceived the play in 2017 as an emerging talent at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, and it’s gathered pace and garnered plaudits ever since. This year it won the Laurence Olivier Award in the West End for Best Comedy.

Now arriving in Sheffield as part of a UK tour, the show retains a distinctly Scottish flavour - McArthur and two of her fellow actors trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

The Bennet sisters swig Irn-Bru and dine from a buffet of Tunnock’s caramel wafer biscuits as they dodge and navigate the whirl of Georgian parties where single men in possession of good fortunes must be in want of wives.

The costumes are true to the period, and much of the dialogue is straight from the book, but there’s something about the added modern-day language, and the healthy sprinkling of obscenities, that brings the social mores of Austen’s England into even sharper and more ridiculous relief.

Despite its 200-year vintage Austen is always disarmingly modern, though the constraints of her time kept the characters in such check that feelings and emotions were frustratingly repressed.

In this production the Bennets let loose, saying the things you always wished they’d say - whilst knocking back the Bailey’s and swigging on the gin.

Lizzie smokes a crafty fag as she chats conspiratorially with George Whickam by the bins, Mrs Bennet collapses in a drunken stupor with a face-plant into the Quality Street, and Jane stuffs herself with cereal straight from the box as she comfort-chats at home in Meryton with her sister.

And then there’s the karaoke.

While the show’s not quite a musical there are plenty of songs, the funniest of which involves the dreadful Lady Catherine de Bourgh, her little known nephew Chris de Burgh, and a rendition of Lady in Red from Leah Jamieson as the perennially likeable Lizzie.

And we finally get to find out - as Lizzie grabs the mic to snarl savagely at Darcy - who Carly Simon was perhaps thinking of when she wrote You’re So Vain.

But for all the swears, booze and pop songs, the play remains surprisingly faithful to the book, with an added reference or two to the famous adaptations which have since made cultural history.

The clinging wet shirt rising from the lake scene which made Colin Firth famous? Even that’s mentioned in there, as the actors break the fourth (fifth and sixth) walls to flit effortlessly from the 1800s to the 1990s to 2022 and back again, bringing Jane Austen’s timeless truisms to life in their most modern and fun reimagining yet.

Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) isat The Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday, November 26