Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice puts five unmarried sisters, a mother determined to see them settled, and two newly arrived gentlemen into the same neighbourhood, and lets the misunderstandings do the rest. Elizabeth Bennet decides within an evening that Mr Darcy is insufferable. She is not entirely wrong, and not remotely right.

The Bennet family has no money to leave its daughters and an estate that will pass to a cousin, so marriage is arithmetic before it is romance. Jane falls in love and is separated from it; Elizabeth refuses a proposal she was expected to accept; a charming officer turns out to be exactly as reliable as charm usually is; and a younger sister does something that could ruin all of them. Everybody judges too quickly, including the audience.

Jane Austen published the novel in 1813, and versions of it have been made for the stage more or less continuously since the 1930s. The book survives adaptation unusually well because it already works in scenes: two people in a room, saying rather less than they mean.

On stage the comedy is sharper than the reputation suggests. The mother is a genuine comic creation, the clergyman is unbearable in a way that is very funny to watch, and the central pair spend most of the story being wrong at each other with great precision. The romance lands because it has been earned by argument rather than declared.

It suits audiences who know the novel and audiences who have never opened it. It works best live, where a ballroom scene with the whole company on stage does something a page cannot.