Jane Austen’s Theatre

There are certain writers (Tolstoy and Cervantes come to mind) who reward handsomely if re-read at different stages of your life. I believe Jane is one of this select group, particularly with this story of Elizabeth and Darcy. However you saw them first time around, re-read after further experience will have shifted the ground, deepened the involvement. They go to the core of our own integrity, our grasp of what is to Jane self-evidently central – the significance of character. Of who you are in your own eyes, and how you are seen, understood (or misunderstood) by others. Elizabeth's great cry at her moment of truth 'I never knew myself!' rings across two centuries to the very heart of our own concerns, our existential angst if you will.

This becomes more so when you notice how much the author leaves us to do for ourselves. Some things she tells us, some we are left to wonder. This is not a bashfulness on her part, it is an instinctive grasp of what is going on between her story and her reader. And it is one of the reasons I have introduced the three Imaginary Conversations, in which two people who have, perhaps, more in common than they know (Elizabeth Bennet and Tolstoy's Count Vronsky from his immortal novel Anna Karenina) exchange abrasive views about each other but later, in parallel with the development of the main story, come to perhaps a better understanding. In theseconversations questions are raised that are part of that work the author leaves us to do. At the same time, by seeing each other across an intervening span of the good part of a century and from the perspective of different cultures, they set an example that invites us to come out of the box of seeing her characters solely through the lens of our own time and our own less certain value system.

Why her theatre? To me Jane is a playwright in all but name. Her instinctive grasp of the dramatic confrontation, the timing of surprise, the dividends from the postponement of the denouement, these are all at the very heart of the stage experience. Look at what is arguably the most dramatic scene in the book, the arrival of the redoubtable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, hell-bent on stopping her nephew marrying Elizabeth. This comes just at the moment when we are expecting something quite different, namely Darcy's second proposal. The whole scene is focused on how Elizabeth handles Lady Catherine. And do we cheer her all the way? You bet we do! By this point we're totally hooked on her not being cheated of her hard-won happiness. Notice how, even under the intensest provocation, she never says a word that's not strictly true, thus answering to herself as well as her adversary. And how she triumphs. Oh, and one last word about Lady C. Would Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell (she of Edith Evans' famous rising inflection, 'a haand-baag' in The Importance of Being Earnest) have been conceivable if Lady C hadn't got there first? Like I said, a playwright to her finger-tips. Enjoy!
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Leslie Caplan, January 2009

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