Northanger Abbey – Orange Tree Theatre, London

Writer: Zoe Cooper

Director: Tessa Walker

Northanger Abbey by Zoe Cooper is a playfully daring take on Jane Austen’s original novel. The outline of Austen’s plot is still visible in Cooper’s rewrite of it as a queer love story. And it works.

Austen fans know that Catherine Morland is a great reader of gothic novels. At seventeen she wants to lead the life of a romantic heroine and jumps at the chance of visiting Bath with older relations. In the original, Henry Tilney is the appealing young man who takes her under his wing at Bath, gently teasing her for her naïve fantasies. In Cooper’s play, Henry (Hen) is brilliantly cast: Sam Newton is no Mr Darcy. He’s slightly built and wears a permanently anxious expression. When it comes to dancing, he may be suave in the slow-motion, sexually charged fantasy scenes, but in real life, he can do no more than hop about earnestly. He is, however, an expert when it comes to muslins. Cooper takes Austen’s tiny detail to suggest, ever so delicately, that Hen may be gay.

Cooper’s Catherine is Cath, although she fancies being Katerina. Her new best friend, Austen’s shallow Isabella Thorpe, is given a delightful makeover as Iz, played with beguiling charm by AK Golding. But it’s a long time before Cath realises what Iz’s enigmatic smiles betoken, longer still before she recognises her own attraction to her. There are lovely meta moments in the play, including Iz’s poignant speech about never finding a novel that speaks to her of her life – a barely coded reference to her queer identity.

If this sounds worthy and/or un-Austen-like, it’s not. Mainly because thanks to Cooper’s tight, witty script and Tessa Walker’s fast-paced direction, it’s all fantastic fun. Rebecca Banatvala gives Cooper’s Cath the mercurial vivacity that Austen’s more demure heroine lacks. The other characters are played with endless invention by Golding and Newton, usually against gender stereotypes. So as Cath’s parents, it is Golding who becomes the father, a plainspoken, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman, while Newton in a vast skirt becomes his ever-pregnant wife. The rumbustious childbirth scene is perhaps a bit too broad and over-egged, but as the play progresses, the pair’s ability to transform themselves into swaggering soldiers or middle-aged ladies works brilliantly.

There’s plenty of energetically played physical theatre too. That familiar device of period stage drama, the carriage journey, is given fresh hilarity when another swaggerer, John Thorpe, takes the reins, Newton especially good at portraying Thorpe’s rattling incoherence.

With little more than a table, a candelabra and spooky lighting (design by Hannah Sibai, lighting by Matt Haskins) we reach the climactic scenes at Northanger Abbey itself. Particularly effective is the transformation of Eleanor Tilney, Henry’s sister, from virtuous to frankly batty.

In Jane Austen’s novels, of course, the complex love stories are neatly resolved. Not to give away too much, but Cooper brilliantly transforms the conventional ending.

Runs until 24 February 2024