Emma evaluation – Austen’s comedy of manners will get an exaggerated Essex makeover | Theatre

An early blast of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance units the temper of this Twenty first-century tackle Jane Austen’s comedy of manners. Award-winning author Ava Pickett transplants the fictional village of Highbury to deepest Essex and dials up the modernity, music and laughs. Emma (Amelia Kenworthy) is a serious-minded kind, albeit nonetheless insufferably self-regarding and judgy. She has simply failed her finals at Oxford University and is in a state of emotional meltdown when she returns residence to start meddling within the lives of throughout her.

Her sister, Isabella (Jessica Brindle), loves pretend tans and Elton (Bobby Lockwood) is an oily property agent in sockless loafers. Emma’s greatest critic and secret admirer, George Knightley (Kit Young), is a builder and brother to oafish John (Adrian Richards), who’s getting married to Isabella. Mr Woodhouse (Nigel Lindsay) continues to be a widower but additionally a latter-day Del Boy furtively carrying on with Mrs Bates (Lucy Benjamin), a beautician, whereas Harriet (Sofia Oxenham), kooky and hapless in love, works within the native Co-op.

The central class change – from genteel society to estuary England – is an impressed stroke by Pickett however the script is laden with over-familiar Essex tropes, and you want for the gimlet-eyed commentary and texture of Austen’s world above this broadness. Where Pickett’s historic drama 1536, staged on the Almeida theatre, resonated magnificently for our time, this appears surprisingly old style in its TV sitcom format, regardless of the trendy updating.

The e-book’s advanced internet of goings-on are streamlined, arguably for the higher, however characters are gratingly exaggerated. That strips the pathos, so it’s exhausting to really feel for them as they cope with numerous romantic wobbles.

Under Christopher Haydon’s path, characters run out and in, journey, conceal and snog comically. The motion edges from social satire, of types, to full-on revolving-door farce and clowning, high-pitched and hysterical, within the second half.

The pumping music and lights carry you alongside whereas Lily Arnold’s set design of a contemporary home with a Regency-inflected inside (lotions, mint inexperienced, elegant stripes) brings subtlety that the script lacks.

Pickett actually captures the guts of a younger, smug lady who has a “disposition to think too well of herself”, too. But her discuss of patriarchy, feminism and consumerism just isn’t sharp sufficient to function social commentary or satire. Her recommendations on empowerment are too rapidly accepted by Mrs Bates, Harriet and John in order that they act in unlikely methods – even throughout the bounds of a farce. And you don’t fairly catch the warmth and smoulder of George and Emma’s sublimated want till moderately too late.

There are some comedian zingers and heat moments, Emma and Harriet’s shut feminine friendship is fastidiously noticed, and Kenworthy and Oxenham make spirited skilled stage debuts. The few earnest scenes in direction of the tip are so stuffed with coronary heart, emotion and impactful stillness that they reveal glimpses of what the play might need been beneath its head of froth.