Tara Dixon in Pride and Prejudice – the Musical at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. Picture: Marcin Lewandowski
Pride and Prejudice the Musical continues at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast until 6 October.
Jane Austen’s timeless novel about manners and marriage has been an irresistible lure to film and television makers in recent years while remaining stubbornly resistant to making the transition from page to stage.
The last high-profile attempt to set the enduring tale of love and longing among the Bennet sisters to music – the ill-fated 1959 adaptation First Impressions (Austen’s original title) – lasted just 84 performances on Broadway despite a book by Guys and Doll’s Abe Burrows, the support of Jules Styne and a cast that included Hermione Gingold and Farley Granger.
But something is clearly in the air. With book and lyrics by Richard Croxford and music by Mark Dougherty, Pride and Prejudice the Musical – a co-production between the Everyman Theatre, Cork and Belfast’s Lyric Theatre – is the third musical version of Austen’s timeless novel in as many years. It follows two American-led adaptations: Lindsay Warren Baker and Amanda Jacobs’ take on proceedings in Pemberley, first seen as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2011, with Josie Brown and Rita Adams’ testing the waters last year courtesy of the Ruislip Operatic Society.
This latest incarnation is the first to come from a British source – more accurately, from Northern Ireland – with designer Robin Peoples joining compatriots Croxford and Dougherty to create a faithful and fun (if rather too respectful) evening that zips along with an elegant and engaging ease despite its three-hour running time.
With a decidedly threadbare on-stage band consisting of piano, cello, fiddle, oboe and recorder too often hampered by an amplified relay causing the music to variously bloom, blur and clot, it’s difficult to get a true measure of Dougherty’s decorous score. It’s at its best when underpinning character, notably in ‘Make Amends’ – a duet between Ben Sleep’s delightfully underplayed Mr Bennet and the splendidly bumptious Mr Collins of Gerard McCabe – and Elizabeth’s ‘Insolent Girl, sung with feisty, full-throated freshness by Hazel Gardner. And it comes, even more so, into its own in the romantic set pieces of the Act I and II closers ‘Wasted Chances’ and ‘If It Be So’. A pity, then, that the instrumental resources available to it do not serve it well.
Croxford’s book, displaying an otherwise amirable fidelity to Austen, risks diluting nuances of both character and narrative by saturating dialogue with screeds of exposition. Even with the show’s generous running time, it necessitates an unfailingly breakneck and breathless delivery often difficult to keep pace with. Against a grain that is slippery smooth, Neil McDermott’s rather stiff-backed Mr Darcy cuts through with a dour, deadpan performance that flares into attractive life in musical numbers delivered with magnetic muscularity.
The production, well received by an appreciative first-night audience in Belfast, moves along at an adroitly brisk (if occasionally breakneck) pace and is especially well served by Tara Dixon’s dexterous doubling as Jane Bennet and Georgina Darcy, the sparky Kitty Bennet of Colette Lennon, Matt Baker’s puppyish Mr Bingley and the full-throttle humour of Christina Nelson’s matrimonially-focused matriarch Mrs Bennet. A word, too, for the light relief of Gerard McCabe’s big-boned, book-hugging Mary and the dark imperiousness of Ben Sleep’s imposing Lady Catherine.
Michael Quinn
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