Austen’s romance tells of matchmaker with lack of self-awareness

Emma

Oxford Playhouse

Tuesday, October 21

IN an 1814 letter to her niece, Jane Austen famously said about her novel Emma: “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”

Unusually for Austen, she was wrong about the heroine (unless she was teasing). The reactions of readers and viewers echo those of Mr Knightley, the book’s attractive but suppressed hero. We’re as likely to find ourselves irritated and impatient with Emma as we are drawn to her, since she is snobbish, self-centred and wrong-headed.

This new production of Emma at the Oxford Playhouse in an adaptation by Ryan Craig and under the direction of Stephen Unwin focuses on the manipulative side of the main character.

India Shaw-Smith is clipped and assertive, rarely softening until the final clinch and kiss with Knightley (Ed Sayer), which earned a round of relieved applause.

Of course we know the pair are going to get together eventually. The joke and the irony is that they don’t know this themselves, each proclaiming until the last moment their intention to stay single. This likeness between them is well brought out in the energetic sparring between the leads.

But Austen’s world is wider than the would-be couple, and the production elegantly fills out the world of Highbury, a village lying in the shadow of Box Hill.

There is music and dance — where would an Austen production be without strategically placed dancing? Against an attractive backdrop (set by Ceci Calf), William Chubb as Emma’s father is a querulous hypochondriac, while Oscar Batterham a wheedling Reverend Elton.

Maiya Louise Thapar effectively shows the upward trajectory of Harriet Smith, so disastrously patronised by Emma, and Daniel Rainford makes a dignified farmer out of Robert Martin.

The second thread in the play involves the appearance in the village of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, both of whom Emma consistently misjudges.

All misunderstandings are finally resolved but only after a disastrous picnic atop Box Hill. This is a key moment in the book, involving a single cruel comment by Emma to the good-hearted spinster Miss Bates, but here extended into a general snark-fest of truth or consequences.

Some of Austen’s subtlety is lost by the editing-out of various characters and the broad-brush approach necessary for dramatisation but, in general, this is a faithful reflection of a much-loved novel and a worthwhile addition to the many productions celebrating the 250 years since the author’s birth.

Philip Gooden