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by Kate Hamill, directed by Rebecca Northan

Grand Theatre, London, ON

May 2-17, 2025

Elizabeth: “The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it”

We should expect lots of Jane Austen-themed events this year, the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. The Grand Theatre in London has already started with Pride and Prejudice, a 2017 stage version of the 1813 novel by American playwright Kate Hamill. This would be good news expect that Hamill has decided that Austen is not funny enough for a modern audience and has tried to punch it up. The results are extremely uneven with characters presented relatively unaltered from the novel mixed with characters whom Hamill has radically changed.

As most will know Pride and Prejudice concerns the Bennett family living in Hertfordshire in the early 19th century. Mr. and Mrs. Bennett find themselves in the awkward position of having five daughters. For legal reasons the daughters cannot inherit the estate where they live and Mrs. Bennett has no inheritance so that the family will be poor when Mr. Bennett dies. Mrs. Bennett makes it her project to ensure that at least one of the daughters marries into money to save the family. The arrival of a wealthy bachelor, Mr. Bingley, as the new owner of the neighbouring estate raises Mrs. Bennett’s hopes. Indeed, Jane, the eldest daughter, does marry Bingley and two of the other Bennett sisters also marry. Elizabeth, the second oldest, marries Bingley’s best friend Darcy, after a mutual misunderstanding of temperaments, and Lydia, the youngest sister, marries an unreliable army office, Mr. Wickham, after Lydia elopes with Wickham.

The characters Hamill allows to retain some semblance of their counterparts in the novel include Mr. Bennett, Jane, Elizabeth, Darcy, Charlotte Lucas and Wickham. In contrast, Hamill completely alters the characters Mary, Mr. Bingley, Miss Bingley and Mr. Collins, with the foolish goal of making them funnier.

Hamill reduces the number of Bennett sisters from five to four, omitting Kitty, the second youngest. Of the altered characters, Hamill’s treatment of the middle sister Mary is the strangest. Any time Mary’s name is mentioned, a horror movie chord sounds, lights blaze and the cast shouts “Oh Mary!” in fear. Mary is made up to look like an 19th-century version of Wednesday Addams and speaks as if she were a madwoman. There is no justification for this in the source. Mary is said to be the plainest of the sisters and rather overproud of her accomplishments but that does mean she inspires fear. Hamill may think the “Oh Mary” sequence is funny, but it rapidly become tedious upon repetition.

The fact that Jane marries Bingley and saves the family from future ruin should lead to a positive portrayal of both characters. Hamill does portray Jane as good-natured and full of grace. Bingley, however, she portrays literally as a dog. Hamill has him bark and pant and even gives Darcy a clicker to clicker train him. Making Bingley look like a fool only makes Jane look like a fool for loving him and Darcy a fool for being his best friend.

In the novel the clergyman Mr. Collins is boring and self-important. In the play Hamill has turned him into a drooling lecher, who first turns his sights on Elizabeth before setting for Charlotte. Who knows where Hamill should get such an idea so remote from the novel.

Austen’s Miss Caroline Bingley is a snob who looks down on Elizabeth and can’t understand why Darcy seems attracted to Elizabeth instead of her. Hamill has decided that this natural comeuppance for Miss Bingley is not enough and makes her turn to the bottle and deliver drunken harangues.

Hamill’s drastic alteration of these four characters is a symptom of her general disrespect for the sophisticated tone of the novel. Other characters like Mrs. Bennett, Lydia and Lady Catherine de Bourgh at least bear some resemblance to the counterparts in the novel but Hamill turns them into cartoonish versions of Austen’s figure. She has Mrs. Bennett, for instance, muster her four daughters by using a whistle as if they were in the army.

Faced with this text, director Rebecca Northan has focussed on emphasizing the theatricality of the piece. Designer Brandon Kleiman has therefore created a set that appears not to be a set. The action takes place on a platform on what is made to look like the unadorned bare stage of the Spriet Theatre. Northan has the actors sit in chairs along the back wall when not performing to underscore the nature of the play as a play. Kleiman has provided a solitary door frame with a door that turned one way can be the door to the Bennett’s house, the other way an entrance to any of the other characters’ houses. Sophie Tang’s lighting is key to differentiating one locale from another.

Joanna Yu has followed Hamill’s versions of the characters with gaudy or outré costumes for the more outrageous characters like Mrs. Bennett, Mary and Lady Catherine, and more sedate costumes for the more rational figures like Elizabeth, Darcy, Jane and Mr. Bennett.

Northan has also emphasized the play’s theatricality through the use of gender-blind doubling with eight actors playing 14 roles. The only two actors confined to only one role are those playing Elizabeth and Darcy. Beck Lloyd and Eric Craig excel as the central couple and the steadiness of their performances, which reflect Austen’s original comedy of misperceptions, provides a rock of authenticity around which Hamill’s stultifying changes swirl into irrelevance. Lloyd and Criag perfectly convey the image of two people who are all too certain their first impressions of each other are correct. Austen’s comedy that the two capture so well is how these two intelligent people must gradually move past this certainty when it is undermined by new information and growing emotions.

Outside of Elizabeth and Darcy the actors do what they can with the roles Hamill has adapted. Andrew Moodie fares well in both his roles – one as Mr. Bennett, the other as Charlotte Lucas. Moodie is amusing as the sensible Mr. Bennett who tries as hard as he can to hide behind his newspaper from all the matchmaking chaos in the family. As Charlotte, he does nothing to make the character ridiculous and we do see her as someone who has sadly had to choose security over love and happiness.

Raechel Fisher presents Jane as a good-hearted if not very introspective person who is happy enough to have married for love with the additional benefit of a fortune. As Anne de Bourgh she has nothing to do since Hammill has not decided to give her a personality. She sits on a low stool shrouded in a veil looking more like a piece of furniture than a person.

Sarah Wilson who plays Mary Bennett and Mr. Bingley has the misfortune of being assigned the characters that Hamill has changed the most. To her credit Wilson distinguishes the two so well a person might not know that one actor plays both. As Mary she is as spooky and melodramatic as Hamill makes her, rather as if Mary had stepped in from a Hammer horror movie than from an Austen novel. As Bingley, she plays up the character’s eagerness to please and fully goes with Hamill’s notion of Bingley-as-dog which is cute if also ridiculous.

Carmen Grant is the only actor to play three roles – Miss Bingley, Mr. Collins and Mr. Wickham. She plays these as Hamill has reimagined them making Mr. Wickham seem a strong and rather less a suspicious character than he is in the novel. Grant’s Miss Bingley is a silly snob and Grant seems to enjoy depicting the character’s non-Austenian slide into alcoholism. Grant plays Mr. Collins as if her were a grotesque villain from a late-19th-century melodrama.

Kate Hennig would be the ideal actor to play Mrs. Bennett if Hamill hadn’t decided to push the character over the top. Mrs. Bennett’s vain attempt to attract Mr. Bennett’s attention through audible sighing might be funny if it were not played so large. Hennig’s other role is as a male page or butler at various households wearing an obviously false mustache.

Lior Maharjan plays both Lydia and Lady Catherine, two more characters that Hamill has turned into caricatures. Maharjan gets across Lydia’s sprightliness, always entering while ringing a bell, but Hamill doesn’t prepare us at all for Lydia infatuation with Wickham. Maharjan plays Lady Catherine as a cross old woman but we never really see what makes her so powerful that Mr. Collins is in such awe of her.

It’s hard to know whom Hamill’s adaptation is meant for. Fans of Austen’s novel will not appreciate Hamill’s coarsening of the characters nor her changing Austen’s comedy of manners into a farce. People unfamiliar with the novel may well wonder why it is so famous when it appears so nonsensical on stage. I enjoyed Northan’s consciously theatrical presentation of the play, but for those not familiar with the novel such a presentation could prove confusing. There is a reason why Jane Austen’s novels are considered some of the most perfect in the English language. To think, as Hamill does, that they must be made funnier to appeal to a modern audience is a sign of overweening pride and an insult to us.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sarah Wilson as Mary, Beck Lloyd as Elizabeth, Raechel Fisher as Jane and Lior Maharjan as Lydia; Kate Hennig as Mrs. bennett and Andrew Moodie as Mr. Bennett; Eric Craig as Darcy and Beck Lloyd as Elizabeth. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.grandtheatre.com.