I must confess to being a little queasy about book adaptations for the stage. They do not always work so well, and you take the risk, particularly in the case of a favorite work, that your imagined recollection of the book may be spoilt.
I am happy to say that this was not the case with this adaptation by Tim Luscombe of Jane Austen's early work. The book is at one level a wry observation of the impact on society of the early 19th Century passion for the gothic novel. At another level it is about the development of the character and understanding of a naive young woman newly entering society, who, in the end, happily gets the right man.
Both these features contributed to an adaptation for the stage that worked very well. The gothic references allowed for the introduction into the mix of entertaining moments of imagined melodrama, and the love story had sufficient twists and turns, triumphs and disappointments, to move the action along briskly, over the course of what was actually a relatively long play.
Well produced and brilliantly acted by what was necessarily largely a young cast, the play was a perfect fit for the early 19th Century Theatre, and a great evening out.
Northanger Abbey plays for another week and then goes off around the country on tour. It is a Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds production and is directed by the theatre's Director Karen Simpson. I do urge as many readers as possible to give this Suffolk born show a good send off by buying a ticket!
(If you cannot go next week it does return to the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, later in the run).
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