David Oakes in Pride and Prejudice!

Spot the difference.

CLARE FINNEY MEETS SIMON READE, WHOSE ADAPTATION OF PRIDE & PREJUDICE IS SHOWING AT REGENT'S PARK OPEN AIR THEATRE

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man or woman looking to adapt Pride and Prejudice does so in the shadow of the BBC. Not only does the image of Colin Firth in a wet shirt remain inextricably associated with Mr Darcy, but the possibility that anyone could surpass Andrew Davies’s sensitive and intelligent handling of one of the best-loved books in English seems remote at best. Yet when the Theatre Royal Bath asked Simon Reade to adapt Jane Austen’s masterpiece, he didn’t even hesitate.

A freelance writer and producer who has adapted numerous novels for stage and television, the existence of Firth’s Darcy proved no more of an impediment to Simon Reade’s taking on Jane Austen than the curious fact that, when he first came across the author’s work in the form of Mansfield Park, he hated her. “We studied her at school when I was 17,” he sighs, “and I was so bored.” Consigning her and her “trivial, enclosed world”—or so he thought then—to the shelf, he pursued his theatre career, first as literary manager at Notting Hill Gate, then at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he adapted his first book, Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes. Not once did Austen touch him. Then, in 2009, Theatre Royal Bath wanted him to bring Pride and Prejudice to the stage.

Before he knew it, Simon was writing out Austen’s tome by hand—his tried and trusted approach to adapting books for stage—and discovering for the first time that this “trivial” melee of marriage concerns contained more than he realised. “Suddenly, I was looking at it again and thinking, gosh, this is deeply political, with class war and interfamilial crises,” he laughs. Partly, he attributes this to him not being “an arrogant 17-year-old boy”. While by no means averse to the teaching of Austen to schoolchildren (“the more familiar you are, the more there is to rediscover”) he thinks it shouldn’t be done without heed for Austen’s political and social vision. His school’s choice of text didn’t help: Mansfield Park might be a worthy piece of fiction, but a heroine referred to by Austen as “my Fanny” was “guaranteed to raise titters among 17-year-old boys”.

Though wary of putting too personal a stamp on his work, as the father of three daughters Simon couldn’t help but bring his own experiences to bear in adapting Pride and Prejudice. “There’s a lot about Mr Bennet and his relationship with his daughters in the play,” he says, “particularly Elizabeth.” You’ll find a more sympathetic interpretation of Mrs Bennet than you’re perhaps used to, too. While the prospect of being left destitute if her daughters aren’t all married off is not one that Simon will ever face, having care of four children means he is conscious of how distressing that must have been—and, together with director Deborah Bruce, he is determined to do justice to a lady who, for all her faults, was “pretty tenacious, and had a big task on her hands”.

Casting for Regent’s Park will be everything. When I speak to Simon, only the roles of Mr Darcy and a few sisters have been assigned, but he has a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for. “One of the things that’s important with this play, particularly the Open Air Theatre version, is that it needs good classical actors with welly in their voice.” This doesn’t necessarily mean older performers, but it does mean a good ability to enunciate—“to get teeth round Austen’s language,” as Simon calls it—and to project. In fact, the protagonists of Pride and Prejudice are pretty young—nearer school-leaving age than the comparatively ancient 35 that Colin Firth was when he pulled on those famous breeches. Their coming-of-age is one of the main filters through which Simon distilled the 350-odd page novel into a two hour play. “Elizabeth Bennet, and to a certain extent Darcy too, are young people discovering the adult world and bringing their childhood zeal and imagination to bear on it.” Together, they embark on a learning experience encompassing everything from sexual attraction to the chopped logic and coded formalities of monsters like Catherine de Burgh, and it is through this lens that the audience will see them in Simon’s play.

The second key filter for Simon was Austen’s political awareness—so deeply embedded in her glittering sentences it has often been overlooked. “Looking back, I think it was mainly this political part I didn’t appreciate,” Simon says. “The criticism at the time was quite dismissive—it was generally believed that her society and politics were only to do with inter-parish issues and that she wrote in a bubble—but there were many clues to the contrary which have only come to light in the past 30 years.” Revisiting the novel with the benefit of maturity, he was able to identify these nuggets and bring them, quite literally, into the spotlight

One of these clues in particular stood out for Simon: a comment from Mr Darcy about the importance of keeping up family libraries “in such days as these”. “He is an aristocrat of old family who, up until recently, were the only ones educated and rich enough to own and read books,” Simon explains. “Austen wrote this just after the French Revolution—a time when the middle class had been rousing the rabble and looking to cut off the heads of aristocrats a few years previously. That phrase ‘in such days as these’ gives away Darcy’s belief that it is his duty as an aristocrat to hoard culture lest the middle classes get a hold.”

This throwaway remark offers a vital clue to Darcy’s brand of snobbery and Austen’s knowledge of contemporary affairs, and such clues are everywhere. Far from leaving the Napoleonic wars out of her writing (as she is often accused) the troops are brought right into the heart of Longbourne—and indeed the Bennet girls—in the deceptively attractive shape of Wickham, a young officer who has been stationed in Meryton, a nearby garrison town. It was, says Simon, the 17th century equivalent of Wooten Bassett. “If you set a story today in a garrison town and you talked about meeting these soldiers in a pub and them having affairs, you wouldn’t need to explain about Iraq or Afghanistan,” he continues, “because we’d know about it. It’s only because we don’t know the history that we don’t realise how specific she’s being.”

The lure of the Redcoats for middle class ladies and the revolutionary fears among landed gentry were the backdrop for a novel which, while not published until 1813, was actually written 16 years earlier. Austen’s brother was an active member of the militia at that time and, as Simon knew from reading the author’s manuscripts, letters and other trivia, wrote home often. Such immersion in Austen’s life was vital in informing Simon’s adaptation. “I know other people try to keep their distance, but I’m the opposite,” he tells me. “I respect my writers, and I love having their involvement.” In the case of Michael Morpurgo, whose books Simon has adapted, this involves chatting on the phone and visiting his home in Devon; in the case of Austen, it was reading as much as possible about her life and work.

She was a prolific letter writer, and a number of lines in Simon’s version of Pride and Prejudice come not from the novel, but from her epistles to Cassandra. “I have been enabled to give a considerable improvement of dignity to my cap, which was before too nidgetty to please me,” she writes in one. This line is resurrected in the play in Lydia’s mouth—an endearing tribute to the young author and the bright, sparkling manner in which she communicated on paper. Novelist she may be to the core, but “it’s a dramatist’s punctuation and dialogue” that Simon sees, and brings to life in his version for the stage.

Looking back, this is not very surprising. Going to the theatre was a major pastime in the pre-screen era, and this and the practice of reading aloud in the evening would have inevitably influenced writers. “Novels were written to be a shared experience, as well as a personal one,” Simon says, “and that’s inherent in the text.” Austen would almost certainly have been in the reading seat: doing the voices, acting and bringing to life the text in a way that, according to Simon, can still be heard in the rhythm of her letters and novels.

For the man charged with adapting it for stage, this seems a blessing. But I still find myself wondering how much the BBC’s totemic version has turned this otherwise hallowed challenge into a curse.

Simon smiles patiently. “There is always an expectation when you are working with familiar material,” he shrugs, “but it’s about reinventing it, telling a familiar story in an unfamiliar way.” While our favourite lines and your favourite characters will be there, he reassures me, “the hope is that you’ll hear it as if for the first time”.

Colin Firth in a white shirt it won’t be, but with such intelligence, sensitivity and insight as Simon patently possesses, that won’t necessarily be such a bad thing.