Credit: David Cooper
This review was initially posted following the November/December 2018 production. There are some cast changes in this Arts Club remount.
At the Arts Club Granville Island Stage until January 4, 2020
Tickets from $29 at artsclub.com or 604-687-1644
Posted December 12, 2019
It’s a wonderful life when a new Christmas play comes around to spice up the old familiar theatrical gluhwein. It’s even better when it feels like Jane Austen couldn’t resist revisiting Mary, the seriously bookish middle one of the five Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
But Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley is Austen-faux. Written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon in 2017, this romantic comedy picks up the Bennet sisters two years after the last page of the novel has been turned.
Elizabeth (Lizzy), still rapturously happy with Mr. Darcy, has invited three of her sisters and their spouses for Christmas at Pemberley, the fabulous manor home that came with marriage to upper crust but charming Mr. Darcy. Jane, married to Bingley, is glowingly pregnant while impulsive Lydia, who ran off with the philandering Mr. Wickham, arrives alone – her husband apparently off womanizing somewhere in London. Unmarried Mary, who is still living at home with her mother and father, has apparently spent the last two years reading and playing the pianoforte. With inheritance laws what they were at the time, upon the death of her parents the Bennet family home will go to a distant cousin and Mary will be turfed out. Her only hope is to marry but hope is fading.
Credit: David Cooper
Not as clever as Austen – and not many are – Gunderson and Melcon offer a few surprises to what almost immediately appears will be as cut and dried as last year’s Christmas cake. When nerdy Arthur de Bourgh arrives, all askew and book-stuffed briefcase in hand, we know exactly where this is going. For heaven’s sake, Mary and Arthur are reading the same book – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique.
Lydia flirts, myopic Arthur dithers and an uninvited guest arrives at the door with the potential to ruin everything.
One of the stars of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley is Ted Roberts’ Pemberley drawing room set. Curved walls with elegant wood molding and floral wallpaper lead to a high, arched glass atrium beyond which we see snow-laden trees. With Conor Moore’s lighting, it’s warm and inviting. A running joke is the live tree that Lizzy has brought into the drawing room for Christmas, claiming it as a “popular German tradition”. Not yet customary in Regency England, its appearance causes each of the visitors to comment – mostly disapprovingly – on it upon their arrival.
Credit: David Cooper
Put a gun on a set and it will almost certainly be fired. Put a piano on stage and it will almost certainly be played. Unfortunately, in this production, the music supposedly emanating from the piano – much of it Beethoven – sounds horribly canned. When Mary, taking out her fury on the instrument, claims, “I am not upset, Beethoven is” I can’t help but think the sound designer is upset at how it sounds, too.
Prim but endlessly curious Mary is played by Kate Dion-Richard. With braided hair wrapped tightly around her head and granny glasses, Dion-Richard’s performance is confident, straight-forward and as sensible as the gowns costume designer Amy McDougall puts her in. She makes a clever, thoroughly likeable Mary for whose happiness we enthusiastically hope.
In various gowns, Lauren Jackson ( Lizzy), Leslie Dos Remedios (Jane) and Baraka Rahmani (Lydia) make excellent foils for plain Mary. One outstanding ensemble – a fur-trimmed coat and outrageously decorated hat – is worn by Anne de Bourgh (Carmela Sison). Sison comes on like a hilariously outraged pitt bull in contrast to Arthur’s spaniel-like submissiveness. When she snaps, “Come along, Arthur,” what can he do but comply?
Darcy (Chris Walters) and Bingley (Tim Carlson) have only to look fashionable flipping their coattails back before sitting on the upholstered period chairs and offering ridiculous advice to lovelorn Arthur.
Under Roy Surette’s direction for the Arts Club, Matthew MacDonald-Bain is a decent but excessively geeky fellow leading one to wonder if Mary might be better off as a spinster. But as Miss Bennet: Christmas Pemberley rolls along we come to believe that with Mary’s affection and respect, he will – as will she – blossom. And how can one not adore a man who gives the most perfect Christmas present to the one he loves?
Credit: David cooper
Playwright Gunderson and Melcon have kept the flavour and language of Austen and they have touched on at least a couple of her hobbyhorses: the plight of unmarried women without means and the unfairness of inheritance laws.
Austen aficionados will have fun spotting the characters and lines from Pride and Prejudice. Best of all is the paraphrased line that Darcy speaks when, at last, a decent compromise is reached and they can all live happily – no surprise – ever after: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a husband.” Fans of Pride and Prejudice, to which this is posited as a sequel, will recognize the line, slightly altered, to be the opening line of the much-loved novel.
Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley is completely inoffensive, sweet as plum pudding and does not require you to sing along to “O Christmas Tree” although you might be tempted.