Austentatious ★★★★★

There have been many shows parodying Shakespeare across the years, from Upstart Crow to the works of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. In fact, throw a stick during the Edinburgh Fringe and you’ll hit a comedic take on the Bard’s work. Dickens has had the same treatment with the improvised No Expectations and the more recent Bleak Expectations that is currently playing in London’s West End.

And now it’s the turn of the Queen of the Bonnet-buster. Austentatious casts a knowing eye across the literary heritage of Jane Austen and discovers that she didn’t only write six novels – Pride and Prejudice and… er, of course, the other five that you know and love. In fact, among the revelations from scholar Dr Sam Patten (a delightfully silly Amy Cooke-Hodgson), who has studied the works of Jane Austen for at least six weeks, not only was Jane unpopular when she accepted a commission to write a column for the Daily Mail, she in fact wrote 1237 novels! And each night, the cast of Austentatious will present one of these 1237 novels as chosen by a member of the audience.

Naturally as each performance is an improvised take on one of these many, many undiscovered titles, we can’t tell you any details of the plot. However, we can confirm that Austentatious is a completely lark that will delight both Austenophiles and non-fans alike. If you’ve not read Pride and Prejudice or… oh Sense and Sensibility, that’s another one, don’t worry. The tropes from Austen’s writing have permeated modern culture from the many, many remakes of Pride and Prejudice to Bridgerton.

Expect ladies arriving from Bath, with a mysterious secret. Expect a foppish hero (a wonderfully bumbling Graham Dickson) whose misfortune has made him as desolate, despairing and discombobulated as Hugh Grant losing a high profile court case against the tabloids. And expect a slightly sinister suitor (played with enticing malevolence by Daniel Nils Roberts) to be revealed (spoiler alert) as a cad, a rogue and basically a complete scheming bastard.

As Jane wrote in Persuasion (there’s another one!): “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like” and like Austentatious we certainly do! The cast are all wonderful improvisers – and not beyond tripping each other up. Foppish hero: “Oh I could dance”. Mischievous spinster: “Go on then”. Cue foppish hero reluctantly skipping about.

Austenisms like “I do not want the glitter you wade in” are mixed with delicious anachronisms (being asked to leave Bella Italia) and a sprinkling of absurdity (“my horse was like a father to me”). For an improvised Austen novel, there’s a surprising amount of filth and sauciness. She clearly got racier in her later works. You will gasp and hoot at the brilliant comedy timing and boundless imagination as the talented performers weave a chaotic, hilariously convoluted, laugh-out-loud Georgian yarn.

In the vernacular of the Hampshire born novelist, please allow The Recs to set aside our tambour, briefly demur from our stitch-work in order to bring you this panegyric: loosen your corsets, hang onto your bonnets and get ready to get lost in this outstanding Jane Austen improv!