Peter Viney's Blog

The Watsons

by Laura Wade
Adapted from the unfinished novel by Jane Austen

Directed by Samuel West
Designed by Ben Stone

Minerva Theatre
Chichester Festival Theatre
Saturday 10th November 2018, 14.45

CAST

THE WATSONS
Grace Molony – Emma Watson, youngest sister
Paksie Vernon – Eizabeth Watson, eldest sister
Katherine Rose Moret – Margaret Watson, middle sister
Sam Alexander- Robert Watson – older brother
Sophie Duval – Mrs Mary Robert, his wife
John Wilson Goddard – Mr Watson, father to above
Sally Bankes – Nanny, the Watsons’ serant

THE OSBORNES
Laurence Ubong Williams – Tom Musgrave, a gentleman
Joe Bannister- Lord Osborne
Jane Booker- Lady Osborne, his mother
Cat White – Miss Osborne, his sister
Tim Delap- Mr Howard, a clergyman to the Osbornes
Leonardo Dickens . Archie Elliot – Charles Howard, Mr Howards 10 year old nephew

OTHERS
Elaine Claxton – Mrs Edwards
Anthony Hampton – Mr Edward, a militia officer
Alex Ashman, Nicholas Sothcott – militia officers
Elander Moore- Bertie|

Louise Ford – Laura, the writer

Laura Wade is riding high with two major 2018 productions, Home, I’m Darling at the National Theatre (and about to move into the West End) and now The Watsons at Chichester, directed by Samuel West with a large first-rate cast.

The Watsons was a novel Jane Austen failed to finish and abandoned in 1805. The play purports to be an attempt to finish it. “Purports” is important. I’ve spent decades talking about Jane Austen, in my occasional role of adapting or editing classics for English Language Teaching as graded (simplified) readers. Austen is unfortunately unsuitable as irony, comedy of manners and subtlety all fail to translate to simpler versions. What does work is narrative, which is where the Brontes, Emily and Charlotte, tower over Austen. They also write dialogue in a modern sense. This is not an assessment for a native speaker audience. Friends who’ve taught A level at all-boys schools say nothing less motivates boys than Austen, and I begin increasingly to hear the same from all-girls schools too. A lot of the problem is teaching it too young – it is intrinsically A level, not GCSE. In the absence of a current mini-series with Mr Darcy emerging bare-chested from a cold water swim in the lake, Austen is not a turn on for 2018 kids. There is a very good programme essay on the ‘Austen industry’ and Austen’s ongoing popularity relies heavily on film and TV adaptations, which is because the actors bring out the subtexts and irony and humour for the viewer.  My daughter got a grade A (before A* was invented) at A level on Pride and Prejudice based on watching the TV series and two film versions, and says she never read the book. And indeed here, we’re seeing The Watsons as a play, a drama, not a novel – the best approach to Austen, apparently.

The play starts out with Austen’s story, beautifully dressed … Regency frocks and tight trousers are so much part of Austen’s appeal. The heroine, Emma, was sent away to live with an aunt when she was aged five, and is returning fourteen years later, to find her oldest sister, Elizabeth, nursing their sick clergyman father. Her other sister, Margaret is the sexy outgoing one. They’re visited by her brother, Robert and his hilariously snobby wife, Mary. Emma has no money, so must marry. Her choice is the bashful awkward but wealthy Lord Osborne, or the dull pious Mr Howard, another clergyman. There’s also the potential choice of Tom Musgrave, a classic handsome cad or scoundrel.

Emma (Grace Molony), Lord Osborne (Joe Bannister), Tom Musgrave (Laurence Ubong Williams)

So far, it’s all very Jane Austen, and it has been noted that Austen may have abandoned it as too autobiographical, though threads were woven into Pride and Prejudice. In The Watsons, Emma’s father is seriously ill. Jane Austen’s own father died while she was writing it. She had created Elizabeth as the 28 year old carer. Austen herself was 29 and also facing life as a spinster.

We see what Austen wrote, played beautifully as we’d expect. Then this is where Laura Wade turns it all on its head. We’ve seen a servant bringing in Robert’s luggage in the background, and she overhears Lord Osborne’s proposal of marriage which Emma is about to accept … bang! Brighter and whiter go the lights and Laura intervenes to confront Emma, and point out that she should marry Mr Howard (we later learn that this was in the notes Jane Austen’s sister made on the unfinished novel). Laura has to reveal that she is actually the author of the play, so she is in fact, Laura Wade (played by Louise Ford, I hasten to add). She explains to Emma that she is a character, and her thoughts are Laura’s thoughts.

Grace Molony as Emma. Louise Ford as Laura. Act Two.

Then the play takes off, and it REALLY takes off too. The thing is, Emma, and later the other characters are miffed to find they are simply manipulated, and one by one they begin to rebel against the author’s authority. The mutinous characters even veer into discussing Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau on the nature of leadership and authority, so also discussing Laura’s authorial … er, authority … same root.  Nanny chimes in on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of Rights. Their erudition surprises themselves.

Laura has to admit that when you’re writing, sometimes a character develops a momentum … life even …  of their own. I was completely transfixed by this. It’s happened to me more than once, but especially in one of my ‘Dart Travis’ novels where a lead character, Marieke, came from nowhere, was based on absolutely no one, and just took off. I had no idea where she was going. I mentioned this in my recent review of Martin McDonagh’s new A Very, Very, Very Dark Matter, where he has Hans Christian Anderson and Dickens with animas in the attic. Same issue, done totally differently.

Laura (Louise Ford, back to us) addresses her characters in Act One. L to R: Emma (Grace Molony, seated), Elizabeth (seated) (Paksie Vernon), Nanny (Sally Bankes standing), Lady Osborne (Jane Booker) Mr & Mrs Edwards (Elaine Claxton, Athony Hampton), Margaret (seated, Katherine Rose Morley), Tom Musgrave standing (Laurence Ubong Williams). Lord Osborne is behind Mrs Edwards, Mr Howard is behind Mr Edwards.

Here the fun is the characters first arguing with Laura, then when she goes to sleep, taking control of their own destinies in ever wilder and wilder ways. At one point, Laura has a phone conversation with ‘Daniel’ about whether he’ll be able to read the play in full (as writing is still in progress)  before issuing the season brochure. Daniel Evans is the Artistic Director of the Chichester Festival Theatre. There are many anachronism jokes. The best, without killing another one, is at the start of Act II. The set is now white rather than pale blue (lighting change) and all the Regency chairs are white painted. The characters all come on to sit in rows to be addressed by Laura. Before she even arrives, they sit on their white wooden period chairs and stare in amazement at the classic vermilion fibreglass chair set up for Laura. No words. That says it all. I won’t spoil the others, OK, one … because it’s in the publicity photos … Laura is now wearing jeans, to the disgust of Lady Osborne.

The chair. The start of Act Two.

There are neat Austen references. When Laura first interrupts the proposal scene, she has this to say to Lord Osborne:

SERVANT (Flailing) I believe my lord, it’s a …well … a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife who … um… has absolutely definitely …

Need I remind you of the first line of Pride & Prejudice?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Sophie Duval as Mrs Robert, Katherine Rose Moret as Margaret Watson

Full marks to every cast member. Grace Molony shone as Emma, first a perfect Austen heroine, then getting definitely stroppy. Joe Bannister as Lord Osborne was delightfully incapable of talking to women. Sophie Duval as the snobbish Mrs Robert, praising the virtues of Croydon, reminds us that Austen could and did write great funny characters. Paksie Vernon was the put-upon 28 year old  sister, Elizabeth, and had to sit motionless from the moment the house doors opened until the play started. Katherine Rose Moret was the sexy Watson sister, Margaret. Cat White was the sexy Osborne sister. Laurence Ubong Williams was a template caddish cad. Tim Delap was the pious ever fair Mr Howard. Sam Alexander was the logical enquiring brother with the awful wife. Look out for Sally Bankes as Nanny and Jane Booker as Lady Osborne too.

It’s important, given other plays, that these are CHARACTERS, as written by Austen, not ACTORS in a play. Laura Wade’s text cheerfully acknowledges a debt to Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search of An Author when Laura again speaks to the Artistic Director by phone.

LAURA: Yes, it is a bit like Pirandello. It’s in conversation with that play, certainly.

Pirandello wasn’t the only example of an author debating a drama with its characters.

Love Off The Shelf: 1988 (left), 1998 (right)

The Nuffield Southampton presented Love Off The Shelf in 1988 (Book: Roger Hall, Music, Philip Norman, Lyrics A.K. Grant). It was a musical based on a Mills & Boone romance writer, who keeps changing her mind about the plot, to the increasing annoyance of her characters. The Nuffield revived in 1998, and we saw both versions. We were inspired by the basic premise to write Love in The Garden for our OUP ELT video series, Grapevine III in 1992. It was one of our favourite scripts, and was used to teach “reporting verbs” and reported speech. We realized that Mills & Boone romances were studded with them: sighed, murmured, gasped, whispered, muttered, demanded. In our story the writer changes her mind on how lines are delivered, and the characters have to replay the scene as she does. It was enhanced by having Amanda Root playing the heroine of course.

Love In The Garden: Amanda Root & Jim Sweeney (Grapevine Three Activity Book)

Chichester Festival Theatre has a brilliant record of turning this season’s Chichester productions into next season’s West End successes … This House, Fracked, Half A Sixpence, Gypsy, Quiz, Caroline Or Change. I’ll be extremely surprised if this doesn’t follow them. The cast is large and three militia officers might be a luxury, as might Mr & Mrs Edwards, but then their plaintive complaint that they haven’t had anything to do since the start was a great moment. I hope they keep it intact. Driving back, Karen (whose idea Love in The Garden was), felt they could trim the amount that Laura says about the writer’s problems by 10 to 20%, in that it dropped the pace and momentum, but we were being hyper-critical. Claire Allfree in The Telegraph review indicates a similar thought. There was just a little too much aside.

BUT If it were starting in the West End, I reckon it would walk “Best new play of 2018.” That is, if Home, I’m Darling doesn’t get it instead. It’s already listed.

*****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

A Michael Billington 5 star award is the ultimate accolade in theatre today.
5 star
Michael Billington, Guardian, *****

I would seriously urge anyone planning to attend Laura Wade’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons,  to stop reading now since one of the play’s many pleasures is its capacity to endlessly take us by surprise. We go in expecting a literary exercise and come out having seen a philosophical comedy … Writers sometimes tell you that a character has the capacity to dictate events. Wade has seized on this tension between authorial control and imaginative freedom to create a stunning play.

Rosemary Waugh, The Stage *****

4 star
Claire Allfree, Telegraph ****

The cast is uniformly on form – maintaining the lethal lightness of Austen’s peerlessly barbed wit, invariably at the expense of their characters, while rampaging , Pirandello style, through the fourth wall. Less successful is the character of Laura herself, who is prone to making blunt-headed points about the limited nature of women’s stories in Regency England and the considerably less limited nature of them today.

Maxwell Cooter, What’s On Stage ****

How fascinating it must be for Wade to write herself into a play and have an actor portraying her – it could have been the acme of self-indulgence but it works brilliantly.  

Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard ****
Sam Marlowe, The Times ****
Patricia Nicol, Sunday Times ****

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

LAURA WADE (writer)
Home, I’m Darling, National Theatre 2018
POSH, Salisbury Playhouse 2015

SAMUEL WEST (director: as actor)
Present Laughter, Bath 2016
The Seagull, by Anton Chekov, Chichester 2015
Ivanov, by Anton Chekov, Chichester 2015

GRACE MOLONY
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Classic Spring 2018 (Lady Windermere)
The Country Girls, Chichester Minerva, 2017 (Kate)

SAM ALEXANDER
Racing Demon, by David Hare, Bath 2017
Love’s Labour’s Won (Much Ado About Nothing), RSC 2014, Stratford (Don John)
Much Ado About Nothing (Love’s Labour’s Won), RSC at Chichester, 2016 (Don John)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, RSC 2014 (King of Navarre)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, RSC at Chichester 2016 (King of Navarre)

JOE BANNISTER
King John, Rose Kingston 2016 (Dauphin)
The Roaring Girl, RSC 2014 (Sebastian)
As You Like It, National 2014 (Orlando)

LOUISE FORD
The Knight of The Burning Pestle, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2014
Quatermaine’s Terms, by Simon Gray, Brighton 2013

TIM DELAP
French Without Tears, ETT 2016

SALLY BANKES
The Rover, by Aphra Benn, RSC 2106
Two Noble Kinsmen, RSC 2016
The Winter’s Tale, RSC 2013