Pride and Prejudice

It was lovely to go back to this little gem of a theatre to watch Swansea Little Theatre’s production of  this Simon Reade adaption of the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice. The original novel is without doubt one of the most cherished love stories in English Literature and not having seen the play I was interested to see how this would work on stage.

Director Claire Owen had been very brave in my opinion in deciding to perform this piece with a large cast of 19 and 20 different scenes. The Director decided to go with one fixed set and the use of lighting to vary the different scenes. This generally worked well, but I did find that some of the blocking did stray into the dark areas occasionally. I did however like the Letters scene very much and thought this was highly effective. The Costumes were very good in representing the period, I was concerned about Mr Collins’ hat in Act Two it did shade his face as it was a tight scene in downlight.

The scene changes were well done with members of the cast involved in carrying these out, i.e prop movement etc. This helped with the pace of the play which I thought was very good in the first half, however in Act Two I did feel that there were instances where the dialogue was slow and queue bites were not quite as good as Act One.

With such a large cast it is important that they worked well as a team and this was indeed the case. It was also a delight to see so many young performers onstage alongside the more experienced ones. 

Rhys Moore playing the iconic Mr Darcy showed the correct amount of arrogance at the start and showed the mellowing of the character well as the story progressed. Tabitha Trend was a very attractive Elisabeth Bennett in her first theatre production since secondary school.

There were however two standout performances for me during the evening and they were Sally Woodward playing Mrs Bennett , her comic timing and pace of her dialogue were to be commended on a very large role which I believe she only took over 6 weeks before the production, well done. Secondly it was Peter Hawkshaw as Mr Collins, you took an immediate dislike to this character as soon as he appeared on the stage, his creepy and slimy character sometimes made your skin crawl and there were some lovely little moments, for instance in the dancing sequence when his partner seemed to recoil from his touch, a very good performance congratulations. These were well supported by a supporting cast of Brian Willis, Charlotte Katie, Jasmine Davies, Brooke Gardner, Erin Sherwood, Ian Govier, Jamie Grey, Jessica Flynn, Rachel Dineen-Mabe, Tracey Lewis, Alexander Sheldon, Sandra Miller Paula Sheldon and Abigail Williams.

It was an enjoyable evening and I am so glad that the company had a very large audience in on their opening night, I hope the remaining performances were also well supported. Thank you once again Swansea Little Theatre for your warm welcome.

 

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