At the Folger: Kate Hamil and Eric Tucker’s superb adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

Ensemble scenes predominate

Dear friends and readers,

The play of Sense and Sensibility by Kate Hamil, produced at the Folger under the direction of Eric Tucker is every bit as marvelous as the reviews have been claiming. Jayne Blanchard does justice to how it uses a technique of presentation, symbolic, spare, with actors playing several roles first found in the RSC TV mini-series Nicholas Nickleby. While Blanchard mentions what happens to the characters of Marianne and Elinor on stage has “emotional impact,” like most others, her emphasis is on the comedy, the high-spirited visual high-jinks which are fun to watch and make a live performance so viscerally electric in the way a film cannot be: laugh-aloud, heart-warming, carousing is what the Folger wants us all to remember and say. It’s as if the one thing everyone in the cast dreaded was that the audience should be re-confirmed (if they had though this) in the idea Austen is stilted, or grave, or somehow a tea-cosy experience.

Perhaps they overdid the swirling about of people on chairs

The one demur I have is that the relentless of the noisy hip-hop and other 21st century pop music before the play began and in the intermission.

The production is often funny in language and visually, but what makes it so good is the play combines strong comedy with strong trauma, precisely the difficult mix that we find in Austen’s novel. Hamil is true to Austen and Tucker too: I was especially impressed by how they made the scene of Lucy informing Elinor that she, Lucy, has been engaged to Willoughby for four years the concluding scene of Act I and give full weight to the nearly silent trauma of Elinor:

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We see the searing deterioration of Marianne after Willoughby’s desertion as the play progresses from Barton to London and finally to Cleveland, with the production (like the 2008 S&S by Andrew Davies) following Emma Thompson’s brilliant insertion of Brandon as a desperate man of disillusioned sensibility when he emerges at Barton, rescuer of the drenched suicidal girl, but at the same time remembering Denis Constanduros’s 1971 adaptation and not bringing Brandon forward early on so that a more delicate nuanced slow courtship over books is provided in the final scenes at Barton. Yet James Patrick Nelson as Brandon could not have been as resonant without memories of Alan Rickman: Nelson’s costume and colors were modelled on Rickman’s:

Brandon receiving the letter about his ward found at last and interrupting the party

What was to me most surprising is that after (since 1971) seven movies (and probably other plays I’ve never seen) Hamil came up with a new and fresh interpretation of Elinor’s controlled or constrained emotional pain. Maggie McDowell as Elinor reminded me most closely of Joanna David in the 1971 mini-series, but the language used was not praise for self-control and prudence, the emphasis in Alexander Baron’s 1983 mini-series with Irene Richards in the role, whose costumes McDowell’s reminded me of

In this scene of the two sisters, Erin Weaver as Marianne also has a dress like that of the 1983 sister, Marianne (played by Tracey Childs)

Hamil’s idea was how Elinor cared for her whole family beyond Edward — the group identity so dear to our time as a goal in life. Some may miss the anguish of Thompson and the inward hysteria of Hattie Morahan (Davies’s heroine) but this production was careful not to over Marianne’s illness, and we were made to see at moment how all but Marianne herself at the close of the play (the play was ceaselessly ensemble acting)

never noticed, much less care for Elinor’s heroic self-sacrifice. The real difficulty of the book itself, responding to it, is to bring forth these contradictory modes: on the one hand, the intensity of inward gravity as caught best in the scenes between Elinor and Brandon:

and on the other, the wacky satire on utterly disjunctive individuals tied together. They were able to make fun while being serious:

The opening death scene done seriously could not quite be serious because of the way it resembled a cartoon

The doubling was inspired: Kathryn Tkel was Fanny Dashwood and Lucy Steele who are mirror characters in the novel; Lisa Birnham as the nitwit Nancy Steele turns back and forth into the corrosively nasty Mrs Ferrars (not allowed a voice, just facial and hand gestures) and then again the ineffective Mrs Dashwood. Jacob Fishel was the selfish heartless and ever-so-correctly mannered (with glasses on) John Dashwood and somehow fittingly handsome gallant rakish and equally selfish Willoughby:

Willoughby as the “preserver” leaving Marianne with her family, all looking at him adoringly

Hamil’s use of Willoughby’s confession differed from all the others I’ve seen in having her Elinor pity him — he is no longer part of the group. This was visualized by Ang Lee and Emma Thompson at the end of their movie, but voiced pity is something new. Davies’s Elinor felt contempt for this petty shallow cad. Jamie Smithson as Edward and Robert Ferrars brought out Edward’s awkwardness and kept him more comic. I did wish that Hamil had not been so reluctant to take over Emma Thompson’s lines — I caught only three very effective take-overs — and had Edward use some of the lines Hugh Grant said so poignantly and gently at the close of Ang Lee’s film.

Not everyone had several named roles: the older African-American comedienne, Caroline Stefan Clary was just Mrs Jennings. Following Emma Thompson, her partner in scenes was Micheal Glenn as Sir John Middleton (though the fun about “F’s” was somehow not as hilarious); he was otherwise ensemble. Margaret was there: Nicole Kang also was many ensemble voices. But Erin Weaver (a brilliant Puck in a recent Midsummer Night’s Dream) was just Marianne, and her breathless intensity reminded me of her earlier performance:

McDowell was only Elinor, but then in this play she is clearly the central character, what individual POV we get is hers — as she is the key subjective voice of Austen’s book.

I very much look forward to when my copy of Hamil’s play arrives on my stoop. I ordered it from Amazon yesterday after seeing the play (a Sunday matinee performance). Hamil twice has a male lover, first Willoughby, and then Brandon cite lines which were finished or concluded by Marianne from poems different from those used in any of the other productions (1983 had some original lines, Thompson had Spenser and Hartley Coleridge, Davies Byron), which I couldn’t catch and thus can’t identity. Again it was Emma Thompson who added these poetry scenes to the one seen here and several others: Edward trying to please Marianne by emoting in this case some (to me) unfamiliar lines. Cowper was mentioned but not quoted (that I could recognize). The choices of verses were all serious and poignant, not rhyming lines either (so perhaps not Pope). (For those interested in the Christianizing and general softening of Austen’s hard (inverted protest). Hamil’s is an adaptation those seriously interested in Austen’s text and new readings of it should not miss.

NB: Lady Susan by Whit Stillman, the novelization of his film is now out as Whit Stillman’s Love & friendship, In which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan is Entirely Vindicated.

It seems to me appropriate that as Stillman has transformed the mood of Austen’s text so he has re-named Austen’s mid-career Bath novel.

Ellen