Sense and Sensibility review – lack of decorum drains tension from Austen adaptation

Soulful and ebullient … Kirsty Findlay and Lola Aluko (both centre) in Sense and Sensibility. Photograph: Fraser Band

You might be excited to know that this adaptation of the Jane Austen novel comes complete with a soundtrack of pop songs. A show with close-harmony renditions of Beyoncé’s Halo, Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor, not to mention wine-bar versions of Poker Face and Good Vibrations, sounds like it could be the next Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), which combined sassy modernity with emotional truth.

Sorry to disabuse you, but no such luck – and not only because musical arranger Adam Morris gives the songs such maudlin settings. That could have added a lovelorn note to Austen’s tale of thwarted romance. No bad thing in itself, except it is not reflected in any other aspect of Adam Nichols’s shapeless staging, a co-production with Ovo in St Albans.

Two crucial things are missing. The first is the decorum of Austen’s world. Only a few of the actors in the eight-strong ensemble have a grasp of Austen’s 19th-century rhythms, and too many break their polite reserve for knockabout jokes or angry outbursts. Theirs should be a rigid society in which codes of behaviour do the talking; take those codes away and you lose the dilemma.

Also missing is a sense of the financial stakes for the Dashwood sisters (here, just Elinor and Marianne without the younger Margaret). Disenfranchised after the death of their father, they are constantly beset by money troubles. They have noble thoughts about love, for sure, but for the story to have urgency, we need to see more clearly how their security is at risk.

Ill served by the production, Frances Poet’s adaptation also suffers from inert discussion and explanatory scenes that interrupt the drama’s forward movement. Nor does it help that Nick Trueman’s colonnaded set forces the poor actors to clomp up and down the steps to a pointless platform at the back of the stage in a play with more coming and going than action.

Kirsty Findlay is stoic and soulful in the role of Elinor, offset by Lola Aluko as an ebullient Marianne, but they can achieve only so much with so many emotional moments denied them.

• At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 27 September. At the Roman theatre, St Albans, 2–18 August.