Emma
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
I had probably been imagining the sense of trepidation as older audience members arrived to sitting-down music in the form of bangers by Charli XCX and Sophie. There is, however, little in the first act of the Abbey’s agreeable take on Jane Austen’s longest novel to unnerve even the most fragile temperaments.
Adapted by Kate Hamill and directed by Claire O’Reilly, the piece takes place in a nebulous anytime between the regency period and the present day. Catherine Fay’s lovely costumes honour the empire-line cut but also allow in candied new-romantic frills. There are no phones or motorcars, but there are outbreaks of contemporary language and an electropop soundtrack. Molly O’Cathain’s lush sets have the look of Laura Ashley if Laura Ashley ever worked in peacock blue. Altogether not an unpleasant space in which to spend a winter’s evening.
Into this steps Toni O’Rourke as Emma Woodhouse. When Austen talked of “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”, she can never have imagined the phrase would dog adaptations for more than 200 years. There is plenty to abhor. Believing herself to have secured a magnificent match for Mrs Weston, formerly her governess, Emma seeks an equally perfect partner for the nervy Harriet Smith. Her megalomania only brings chaos. Liz FitzGibbon, playing Mrs Weston, gives us a likable realist from a Sharon Horgan series. Hannah Mamalis, the show’s hilarious MVP, makes of Harriet a besotted teen from a boarding-school novel.
O’Rourke understands the brief and executes it with some gusto. Austen was wrong about her lead character (and, as a great ironist, surely knew she was wrong). The manipulator is a menace, but her vim and imagination never fail to captivate. The lead here is both helped and hindered by a quirky adaptation that has her in conversation with the audience. This can be amusing when she chides us for not warning her about what is to come. The bigging up of the director by name is, however, the sort of self-congratulatory joke that should have been left in the rehearsal room.
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Hamill and O’Reilly do a decent job of corralling the novel’s large cast of pinballing characters. O’Rourke sonorously intones the name of Emma’s rival, Jane Fairfax – played with comic dignity by Ciara Berkeley – as the cast of the Mean Girls musical chanted that of fearsome Regina George. It clicks together over a lively opening act that honours the original and savours contemporary pop descendants.
After the interval, however, there is a sense of the structure being shaken a little too vigorously. The musical numbers in the ball scene are a blast, but later efforts to justify Emma’s actions are too on the nose. “You don’t remember that from the novel,” the protagonist quips. Well, no. And there are good reasons why those lines weren’t there. At least one revisionary twist is exactly the sort of manoeuvre you’d expect from such a project in 2024.
One nonetheless leaves with a definite buzz on. Which was surely the aim.
Emma is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, January 25th
