Emma at Rose Theatre Kingston – review

Ava Pickett is a writer on song. Her debut play 1536, a vivid chunk of reimagined history, won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for women playwrights. Now she’s followed it up with a riotously funny, freewheeling farce, extremely loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma.

The genius of the piece is that – rather like the very different Clueless – it changes everything about the 1815 novel, yet preserves its profound moral structure, recognising that the reason it is a classic is not its Regency setting (here replaced with an Essex semi), or even the decorum of its characters (out of the window) but its essential examination of what it means to be good.

Pickett cleverly reframes the narrative in the present day and within the tight, comic frame of a wedding. Her Emma Woodhouse is still clever and handsome, but leaves Oxford without a degree (she didn’t turn up for exams) to return home to Highbury for the marriage of her sister Isabella (Jessica Brindle, a bossy wonder in fake tan and a pink tracksuit) to John Knightley (a warmly affectionate Adrian Richards) who is brother to George (Kit Young), who is the love of Emma’s life. Though neither of them knows it.

As Emma, Amelia Kenworthy is both snobby and nervous. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s failed, so she sets about interfering in their lives, her effortless and unbearable sense of superiority letting her dictate that her friend Harriet shouldn’t date Rob (Josh Bilyard), the Amazon delivery man, but should pursue Elton, a sleazy estate agent.

She’s condescending to Mrs Bates (Lucy Benjamin), the ditzy local beautician, who is secretly in love with Emma’s father Mr Woodhouse. And he’s brilliantly reconfigured by Nigel Lindsay as a dodgy wheeler-dealer who buys cut-price funeral flowers for his daughter’s bridal bower and justifies the stealing of laptops from a primary school with the line “we’ve got to get kids off screens.”

Part of the joy of Pickett’s writing, beautifully directed with timing and precision by Christopher Haydon, is just how good her jokes are. The lines have the fluency and drive of heightened speech – “Do you want a long weekend in Barcelona or two weeks in Gibraltar?”, Mrs Bates asks of fake tan shades.

But Pickett also delivers pure gags. Some are physical – there are a lot of farcical slamming of doors, pratfalls and shoving in cupboards on Lily Arnold’s dolls’ house set, with its multiple entrances and a long, central staircase. Some are just wonderfully silly: Isabella’s obsession with the vicar’s dog collar not suiting him, or her constantly changing hair. Yet some courageously land even as the narrative tightens its meaning. “I know she looks clever, but she just doesn’t wear makeup,” Isabella wisely announces as Emma’s machinations begin to unwind.

What underpins this surface farce is an undertow of deep feeling. When Emma insults Mrs Bates, Knightley quotes Austen directly. “It was badly done, Emma,” he says. The sudden shock of that admonition, gravely delivered by Young, who makes Knightley both watchful and passionate, is a sharp reminder of the real costs of bad behaviour, just as in the novel. It is a turning point.

It is matched by Pickett’s own sensibility. Her speech for Mr Woodhouse about custard doughnuts in “the big Tesco” and the repercussions of loss, utterly reflects Knightley’s own declaration of love – again lifted from Austen directly – “if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” It is writing of the highest quality.

The performances – fast, beautifully timed – do the conceit justice. There are four stage debuts, all excellent, but special mention to Sofia Oxenham’s Harriet, full of corkscrew anxiety and inexpressible longings for love. “I’ve got to get to work, get an eye test and die alone,” she announces mournfully, as she stalks off. I also loved the moment that Bobby Lockwood (another debutant) looked down at his muscled body and said: “I’m an estate agent. Obviously.”

With this Emma, and Beth Steele’s blistering Till the Stars Come Down, it’s proved a good year for weddings on stage. Both writers use them in the same way – to reveal truths far beyond the surface mayhem. That great social comedian and truth teller Jane Austen would be very proud.