Review: Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) at the Floral Pavilion ****1/2

From Oscar winning Hollywood film to Bridget Jones to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen’s 1813 novel of manners has become her most adapted and retold story.

It’s a big year for Austen in 2025, and for Pride and Prejudice too. There are events and celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth, while THAT BBC adaptation turns 30.

Meanwhile Isobel McArthur’s larky and whip smart music-infused adaptation is out on the road entertaining audiences, this week in the sunny seaside surroundings of New Brighton’s Floral Pavilion.

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) started life at the tiny Tron Theatre in Glasgow seven years ago, went on to storm the West End – scooping an Olivier for Best Comedy - and is now on its second nationwide tour.

While it remains faithful to the overarching narrative and themes of the original (class, status, societal expectations, family relationships, love and, yes, pride and prejudice), it’s also an anarchic and affectionate lampooning of parts of the plot and characters, mixing contemporary references with historical detail, which one suspects Austen herself would have appreciated.

Writer-director McArthur’s Upstairs Downstairs conceit involves the novel’s (mostly) nameless servants – the cast materialise amid the audience before the start wielding dusters, mops and plungers - relating the romantic trials and tribulations of their employers, in which the paid help are not just witnesses but, they insist, integral to a happy ending.

Above: (from top) Mrs Bennet (Rhianna McGreevy), Jane (Christine Steel) and Lizzie (Naomi Preston-Law). Top: the cast of Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Photos by Mihaela Bodlovic.

Their narrative is augmented by a cleverly woven series of musical numbers performed karaoke style by the cast, from Elvis Costello’s Every Day I Write the Book to Pulp’s Something Changed via The Shirelles, The Divine Comedy, Carly Simon and Bonnie Tyler.

Emma Rose Creaner, Eleanor Kane, Rhianna McGreevy, Naomi Preston-Low and Christine Steel populate the stage with a myriad of roles, at times swapping between them in a single beat. It’s all slickly done without feeling over polished.

There’s lots of fun to be had in channelling some of the story’s most colourful characters; Creaner merrily yo-yos between the enthusiastic Bingley and his snobbish sister Caroline – a rotter to servants, while McGreevy is both a delightfully sweary (there’s a LOT of effing and jeffing) Mrs Bennet and an aloof Mr Darcy (sans wet shirt), and Steel has tongue firmly in cheek as a majestically haughty and ferocious Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Kane has her hands full swapping between all three of the youngest Bennets, and Preston-Low is a plain-speaking, eye-rolling, no-nonsense proto-feminist heroine as Lizzie.

Designer Ana Ines Jabares-Pita’s sweeping staircase-dominated set becomes, variously, Longbourn, Netherfield, Pemberley and Rosings Park over the course of the play, a canvas against which the five-strong cast manoeuvre pieces of furniture and props on and off at lightning speed in what is a joyous and thoroughly entertaining rollercoaster ride.