This merry Sense and Sensibility has shades of 1980s small town disco

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Four Stars

Love and death are at the heart of Jane Austen’s 1811 coming of age novel, in which the very different Dashwood sisters embark on romances that are all but doomed before they even begin.

As the title of Austen’s anonymously published debut suggests, and as France’s Poet’s new stage adaptation makes clear, the responses of both single ladies to their travails are key. Where Marianne is an emotionally charged whirlwind who lays bare her heart with all manner of high melodrama, her sister Elinor is infinitely more grounded, sometimes to her detriment.

As gradually becomes clear too in Poet’s take on things, much of Marianne and Elinor’s respective reactions stem, not just from dealing with the feckless drips who court them up the garden path, but from the man they have already lost.

Kirsty Findlay and Lola Aluko in Sense and Sensibility. Picture: Fraser Band (Image: free)

This, of course, is their father, whose funeral opens the play, and whose influence on the two daughters he left behind has clearly left its mark. What follows in Adam Nichols’ production sees the Dashwood girls play out their assorted affairs in a thoroughly modern manner. This is brought home by the demonstrative largesse Lola Aluko brings to Marianne, and to the more guarded intelligence of Elinor, as realised by Kirsty Findlay.

Contemporary mores are there too in Pippa Murphy’s sound design and Adam Morris’ musical arrangements, which punctuate each scene with lounge bar piano versions of latter day pop songs. The chaise longue that sits centre stage throughout much of the goings on might also hint at such reference points.

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These musical interludes fit in perfectly with Nick Trueman’s pillar lined set, which, during the musical numbers, resembles a 1980s small town disco.

This co-production by Pitlochry Festival Theatre with the St Albans based OVO theatre might be regarded as a less wilfully audacious spiritual sister of sorts to Isobel MacArthur’s wild take on Pride and Prejudice (sort of), which recently took Austen’s difficult second novel to the west end.

If the tone of Poet and Nichols’ show more resembles Elinor than Marianne, in terms of its romantic rites of passage, it nevertheless remains a merry dance of a show.