Jane Austen with the humour heightened a hundredfold

Eleanor Kane feels that the circle has somehow been closed now that she is on the road with Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).

Transcript

00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Really lovely

00:07this afternoon to speak to Eleanor Kane, who is on the road with one of the best shows

00:12I've seen in the last couple of years. Fantastic is coming back to Chichester, it's also coming

00:16to Southampton, Pride and Prejudice brackets, sort of. Now that sort of is important, isn't

00:23it? It's not straight Jane Austen by any means, and yet it is, isn't it?

00:29Yes, it's the classic tale, Pride and Prejudice, very much turned on its head and told by,

00:36from the perspective of five maids, the kind of the upstairs, downstairs, the downstairs

00:42of the upstairs, downstairs, in this period world. And they are telling this story for

00:48the audience and putting on and off different costumes, playing all the different characters

00:55and giving it a little bit of a cheeky twist. A little bit of a cheeky twist, you're saying

01:02you take the humour that's in the Austen, but goodness, you heighten it a hundred times,

01:06thousand times? Yeah, I would say, yeah, we take what's already there, but we really,

01:12yeah, we really ham it up and it's full of fun, gags, a little bit of naughtiness, and

01:22lots of music, singing, dancing, loads of props and just general hilarity. We get lots

01:32and lots of laughs. You can genuinely say, can't you, that it is respectful of Austen, isn't it?

01:37Yes, it is. We actually use a lot of the original text, like the original text of the book and

01:44the script, you know, I would say half of the dialogue is actually Austen's original dialogue,

01:49and it is, that is what makes it such an amazing production, because it does,

01:52you know, have that real element of truth to her work, but we are also adding our own spin to it

02:01and making, and kind of reinvigorating it to a much wider audience, I think, who wouldn't normally

02:07enjoy Austen's work. Absolutely, so you get the Austen sceptics, those who don't know much about

02:13Austen at all, but you also get the aficionados, don't you? And you please all of them, which is

02:17quite some achievement. Yeah, yeah, we do. There's a couple of, there's a couple of jokes in

02:23it that are definitely a little nod to the ones that really know what they're talking about, you

02:28know. So that's really nice to get that specific laugh, you know, from people that were like, oh,

02:35I know that bit from the book or the TV series or the, whatever that is. So that's a really nice

02:41thing. And fantastic that you're in it, because it's almost fate that you should have been in it

02:45at some point. You so nearly did, but an email went astray. Tell the story. Yes, so I actually

02:55emailed in to audition for the show when I was a student back in 2017, so a long time ago, and I

03:05never got anything back, or the email got lost, and I thought, okay, whatever. And then

03:12many years later, March last year, I was in the audition process, and I said this to the director

03:17and writer, Isabel McArthur, and she was so mortified that they didn't get back to me,

03:24that she actually searched her email chain in the room and found out that they did send an email to

03:30me, but it got lost in my university's email chain, so I never actually got the audition,

03:40never got the invite to audition, and so it was a big full circle moment to actually get more.

03:47You could never, ever have known that they had properly actually replied.

03:51I know, I know, I know. It's so funny, and it was, I'm from Glasgow, and the show actually started,

03:56one of the first venues was at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, so it's actually quite a Scottish

04:02heavy show, and obviously the writer, Isabel's from Scotland, and yeah, so it was nice to

04:10do it like that. It feels quite homely to do the show.

04:15Absolutely, as you say, full circle. Well, Eleanor, really lovely to speak to you, very much looking forward to seeing it again.

04:20Have a great tour. Thank you. Thanks very much.