Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) review: There’s bite to this fluffy cucumber sandwich of a show

Behind every period drama there are servants: fetching afternoon tea, delivering letters, and scrubbing troublesome stains out of the bedsheets. Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of), Isobel McArthur’s raucous take on Jane Austen’s novel, is narrated and performed by these put-upon skivvies, who stuff the story with innuendo and point out the brutal economic realities that lurk beneath its surface.

You know the drill: smart Lizzie, beautiful Jane, buff Mr Bingley, and sarky Darcy meet at a succession of balls, their inevitable happy endings delayed by an excess of pride and prejudice. That’s all here. But there’s some extra bite to this fluffy cucumber sandwich of a show. McArthur’s adaptation isn’t the first to draw attention to the fact that Mrs Bennett’s desperation to marry off her daughters comes from the fear of destitution. But she does explicitly get her characters to spell out the grim realities: this is an era where spinsters can’t inherit (as they wisecrack, why would they need money when they’ve got cats to keep them warm?) and women are treated as men’s property. It’s hardly very romantic.

So McArthur, together with director Simon Harvey, punctures this story’s swoonier, prettier trappings with a well-aimed feather duster. Instead of dancing, these characters sing hilariously well-chosen karaoke songs at pivotal moments (Meghan Tyler’s rendition of “Lady in Red”, sung to a preening Lady Catherine, is a particular highlight). Swear words pepper the air as “ladylike behaviour” becomes an ever more impossible aspiration. And the refreshment table at Meryton Ball is piled high with Irn Bru and Tunnock’s wafers, instead of cucumber sandwiches – a nod to this show’s origins as a 2018 hit at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre.

A hugely talented five-strong, all-female cast take on the weighty task of playing every character in Austen’s novel, and they pull it off with polish. McArthur herself stars in the plum role of Darcy, smouldering her way through a Pulp cover at the story’s climax in a way that makes it impossible to believe that moments before, she was nursing her neuroses on the couch as the perma-anxious Mrs Bennett. Tyler’s Elizabeth is bold and always ready with some choice insults: she sings “You’re So Vain” to her snobby would-be husband. And when she’s not stumbling drunkenly about as an oafish Mr Bingley, Hannah Jarrett-Scott gives this story a rare and valuable note of seriousness as Charlotte, forced to marry for money, and harbouring a yearning for Elizabeth she can hardly give voice to.

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Austen is a master of understatement and carefully shaded little ironies. This production drags her subtext kicking and screaming into the daylight. Hardened Janeites might well cry “Heaven and earth! Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted!” But with the loss of tradition and subtlety comes something else: a scathing critique of a society where the rich got to gossip and party all day while servants scrubbed, and where ladies used politeness as a survival tactic – one that today’s women can joyfully, raucously discard.

‘Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of)’ runs at the Criterion Theatre, London, until 2 February 2022