Pride and Prejudice will always be the most famous Jane Austen novel, but not only does Emma snap at its heels, it seems far more suited to modern updates – this year alone has given UK theatre the West End musical version of classic ‘90s adaptation Clueless, a more period accurate Emma in Bath, and this: a rip roaring modern update from rising star Ava Pickett.
I suspect the issue is that while Pride and Prejudice is largely beloved because of how bafflingly complicated the love lives of the rural upper classes were in Regency England, then Emma goes the other way. It concerns Emma Woodhouse, a bright, well meaning if somewhat deluded young woman who decides she’d do a really great job of project managing the love lives of her friends and family – and then proceeds to screw everything up spectacularly. We can all relate to that!
Directed by Christopher Haydon as a full throttle, pop song-bedaubed near-farce, Pickett very enjoyably leans into the idea of Emma as a fuck up. The time is around now, and the place is Essex – or rather it is after a brief introductory sequence set at the University of Oxford, where Emma has just failed her degree. With a year to go before she can resit, she limps home to the hometown she never wanted to return to, using her sister Isabella’s imminent wedding as cover. Unfortunately her embarrassment at her own failure becomes exacerbated by her wheeler dealer dad Mr Woodhouse (Nigel Lindsay) persuading the local newspaper to run a story about her graduating. So she brazens it out, to the extent that she allows her sardonic former school friend George Knightley (Kit Young) to take all her worldly possessions to the charity shop, as she refuses to admit to anyone but her BFF Harriet (Sofia Oxenham) that she’s moved back in.
In many ways Pickett has cleaved faithfully to the structure of Austen’s story. She’s added a load of stuff, sure, but at its heart roughly the same things happen to people with roughly the same names. She has, however, changed the characters enormously, and while I some might baulk at its Essex makeover, I thought it was great fun made into something really special by Amelia Kenworthy’s phenomenal comic performance in the title role. Armed with an arsenal of grimaces and eyerolls that would make Tim from The Office jealous, Kenworthy makes Emma both utterly infuriating and entirely loveable at the same time, as she lets her insecurities – and occasionally, pettiness – drive her to attempt to micromanage the hometown she’s only just reluctantly returned to, with disastrous results. She also walks the line between Emma being an annoying busybody with ideas above her station, and Emma actually being quite special but nonetheless a total disaster (this is most beautifully encapsulated by her taking against a guy Harriet fancies because Emma clearly bears a grudge about him spoiling her assembly on the Suffragettes in Year 8).
It’s great fun, basically, Pickett using Austen’s rock-solid foundations as the basis for what is, in many ways, her own original story, one that shares a lot of DNA with her excellent recent Almeida hit 1536 while showing a sunnier and more commercial side to her writing. Clueless is a good comparison in terms of it being funny, accessible and deviating from OG Emma really quite a lot. But it’s recasting Emma Woodhouse as a fiery working-class woman blessed by a towering intellect and total lack of emotional intelligence that defines it. And it deserves to make a star of Kenworthy. This is her professional stage debut (her biggest screen role to date was as Mirdania, a nice elf who dies horribly in The Rings of Power). But here she absolutely smashes it as a comic leading lady with complicated emotional depths – I hope more stage work is on the cards in her near future.