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Zoe Cooper’s spirited three-hander romp through Jane Austen’s gothic novel satire takes one of the great writer’s lighter, sillier works and thoughtfully – if unevenly – mines it for subtext.
Most specifically, queer subtext. In Austen’s book, impressionable young fiction fan Cath (Rebecca Banatvala) is invited to fashionable Bath for the winter season. There she falls in with the free-spirited Iz (AK Golding). The pair become fast friends, even resolving to marry each other’s brothers so they can spend more of their adult lives together. But in the end Iz drops out of Cath’s life after discovering how little her brother actually earns, leaving Cath to shack up with mild-mannered Hen (Sam Newton).
The cleverness of Cooper’s adaptation is that she plays on Cath’s unreliability as a narrator, less rewriting ‘Northanger Abbey’ than apply a reading on to it. She smartly uses both what’s in the book and what’s omitted from the book – the narrative skips a lot – to imagine Cath and Iz in a clandestine relationship that they lack the understanding or social freedom to pursue. Austen probably didn’t in fact write a subtext-heavy novel about repressed lesbianism in Georgian England. But given the times, then if she’d wanted to write one it may well have still read like ‘Northanger Abbey’.
Putting a bold interpretation on what was a fairly trifling book by Austen’s standards feels much less provocative than if it was one of the biggies like ‘Pride and Prejudice’. And it’s not a colossal stretch: Cath’s abrupt break with Iz and slightly odd relationship with the millinery-loving Hen do raise some genuine questions.
The flip side of a lightweight source text is that you’re still stuck with a lot of goofy gothic novel pastiche that has limited bearing on a queer interpretation. The gayer the play, the more compelling it is, and the more we see of Bantvala and Golding’s excellent chemistry, both giddily exuberant and tentatively nervous.
But in the third act it does get bogged down in Cath’s obsession with gothic melodramas. Sure, that’s the story Austen wrote, but once the play has gone there with the queer romance, the long passages of Cath getting worked up about crumbling country homes feel quite tangential.
Tessa Walker’s direction is crisp and pacey but could definitely stand to be a bit more stylish: when Cath lamps a soldier and a judderingly anachronistic guitar line kicks in it’s quite a thrill, but the music fades out after a few seconds and there’s never another moment like it. Done on an obvious budget, it feels one draft and an actual set away from where it needs to be. But it’s a great starting point for the perennial problem of How To Actually Adapt Northanger Abbey, and its best it’s exhilarating, transmuting Austen’s daftest novel into something really quite beautiful.