Review: 'Northanger Abbey' at the Orange Tree Theatre

'Northanger Abbey' Review

‘Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of any sort of disappointed love’. So runs a line in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and it’s one that playwright Zoe Cooper uses as the pivot for what’s essentially an imaginatively queer retelling of a classic novel. 

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Pamela Raith

Northanger Abbey, published posthumously, is Austen’s take on the Gothic romance, a genre fashionable in the early nineteenth century, in which her heroine, young Catherine Morland, ventures out of her cloistered village world to the beguiling urban charms of Bath.

Catherine is what's known as an ‘unreliable narrator’, and Cooper has ingeniously used this as the premise for reinterpreting much that’s unspecified in the novel. Catherine’s friendship with the vivacious Isabella, which breaks off unceremoniously, is now reconfigured as the parting of two women passionately connected who cannot live together within the society they inhabit.

In this production, all the roles are played by a cast of three, something which actually works pretty well, with many gender roles being reversed for comic effect, such as Catherine’s father, played by AK Golding, and her mother, by Sam Newton. Newton provides much hilarity in his roster of female roles, most notably as Henry Tilney’s strange, almost surreal, sister Eleanor.

Persuasive as the quieter, more self-sufficient Tilney, he’s also first-rate as obnoxious John Thorpe, Iz’s overbearing brother; the carriage ride on which he takes an apprehensive Catherine ( Rebecca Banatvala) is beautifully presented here, with minimal props but maximum imagination at work.

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Pamela Raith

There’s certainly much to enjoy, not least the cast’s energy and inventiveness, but sometimes Tessa Walker’s production does feel somewhat rushed, with pivotal scenes skated over fleetingly. The world Cooper explores is intriguing but also fraught with social dangers – like the predatory soldiers in Bath who accost Catherine and Iz.

Hannah Sibai’s design is one of the production’s stronger aspects, mere suitcases serving as a carriage, a table as a bed and, most magically, a scale model of Northanger Abbey itself conjured from a travelling trunk.

By Act Three, when Catherine finally arrives at the eponymous abbey, her awe at the Gothic monstrosity- and her overactive imaginings- are palpably comical elements of the original novel, which are authentically recreated here. With an incisive eye and bold concept, Cooper has certainly reinvented and illuminated a lesser Austen novel.

Is it entirely satisfying as a show? No, but at least it has the courage of its convictions.