By Lucy Kaufman
If you’d told 24-year-old me I would, one day, co-write a show The Complete Works Of Jane Austen In 90 Minutes, I wouldn’t have believed you. But if you’d managed to persuade me it was indeed true, I would have been thrilled.
I discovered Austen by reading Emma in a deckchair on an Italian beach, inbetween playing with my two babies in the sand. At 24, and two centuries on from when she wrote, I felt extremely late to the Jane Austen party but, as soon as I was cordially invited into her early 19th century world, I didn’t want to leave. Within weeks, I devoured all six of her novels and watched every TV and film adaptation I could lay my hands on.
“Why didn’t someone tell me?” was my response to reading the opening of Emma. Despite being over 200 years old, the writing felt surprisingly fresh, witty, insightful and relevant to the female experience. My favourite of the six novels, I discovered during that binge-fest, was Persuasion, Austen’s last complete novel and known as her most mature work. My previous knowledge of Persuasion had been via my brother’s loathing of it for A-Level English Literature, but perhaps it’s not the best choice of text for teen boys! I also had a massive soft spot for her first novel, Sense And Sensibility.
A few decades on, that same brother who resented being made to read Persuasion at 17, a few other writers from his Script Hub classes and I have written this show in honour of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. It was, like all collaborations with my brother, highly ambitious, if not foolhardy, as we condensed all six novels and however many characters into one 90-minute show, and all for a 21st century audience. Each playlet/novel was 15 minutes and was, therefore, a feat of engineering in terms of miniaturising the plot, adapting casts of dozens for a cast of six, which included an actress playing Jane Austen herself, who narrates and interjects. Just five actors to play every one of her characters is no mean feat!
I was honoured to write two of the six plays: Emma and Sense And Sensibility, and enjoyed immensely the opportunity we had to produce faithful adaptations of the books whilst also injecting added humour in terms of our current thinking on class, gender, literary stereotypes and conventions, social privilege and entitlement. Some of my characters broke the fourth wall, commented on the form and content of the books and/or the staging of the play itself, and used anachronisms. In order to get over the hurdle of the small cast, there was some gender-bending and much exchanging of bonnets! For added fun, the Bennett sisters in Pride And Prejudice were all played by one actress.
I can’t imagine what Jane Austen would make of all this fuss about her birthday, 250 years on. She would probably be flabbergasted, especially how her stories, handwritten in ink in virtual secret in one room, and published anonymously by ‘A Lady’, are now consumed visually in broadcasts and digitally online, translated into over 40 languages and easily accessible to all corners of the world. I hope she would enjoy the farcical fun of our potted versions. I like to think she would appreciate our attempt at building on her wit and satirical commentary about her times and society with humour and incisiveness from our own.
These six short plays were fun romps but there is a serious, still relevant side. In celebrating Austen we’re celebrating women’s writing, the vitality of human creation and expression and stories and characters that endure. We are reminded of the societal changes in 250 years, and how some things, such as human feelings, for better or worse, remain the same.
It’s difficult to know what Austen would make of our current world, where a wedding or good romantic match is not necessarily the happy ending it is in the world of her books. A world where we’re connected to almost everyone at the click of a touch-pad and countries can be destroyed at the press of a button. Where we see through the privileges of certain sections of society yet there are still incredibly powerful, wealthy individuals. Where misogyny, racism, classism, snobbery, exploitation, social inequality, ableism are still rampant and sewn into the fabric of our institutions and societal structures.
Austen’s world presents a white, upper-class patriarchal society grown rich, advantaged and spoilt on the violent oppression and exploitation of much of the world by our Empire. The minor feuds and concerns in her books are petty and frivolous in comparison to what the world was enduring at our British hands, and I understand why people would reject her stories. Yet, Austen is a woman of her times and writes with the sharp eye that only a female observer in her class-ridden, patriarchal society can have; one which sees through hypocrisy, senses injustice, has felt deeply, thought critically and endured relative inequality in silence.
Likely an abolitionist, Austen refers to the slave trade spectre of her times only once in all her books. In a scene at dinner in Mansfield Park, the young Fanny Price questions her Antigua plantation-owning uncle and is met with dead silence. If she were writing today, I hope Austen would feel able to make Fanny delve and critique much further, and Austen herself would speak out.
I don’t know how long we will go on reading, or watching, Austen. And who knows where we’ll be in another 250 years? What will future generations be berating us for remaining silent about now? But maybe that’s the beauty of honouring Austen; in celebrating what we do know, what has been. In these short plays, by injecting our knowledge and understanding of now into her stories, we were in a small way preparing the ground, as always, for what could be. For that is what stories do, what stories are for. To point out, to show what’s wrong, to highlight what doesn’t feel good and should, if possible, feel better, be better. To pave the way for a universal happy ending.
If nothing else, it’s amazing to think that what a woman wrote in secret, alone, with no support or systems in place for helping her do it, over two hundred years ago, still has life and brings pleasure to people today. It should provide inspiration for our current creatives, who have the advantage of the entire world at our fingertips.
Our The Complete Works Of Jane Austen In 90 Minutes was just one of a multitude of events around the country celebrating 250 years since her birth. I’m pleased to have made my (very small, potted) contribution.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen!
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The Complete Works Of Jane Austen In 90 Minutes was produced by Spontaneous Productions and performed at St. Bartholemew’s Church, Sydenham, South East London on 14 and 15 November.
Lucy Kaufman is an award-winning author, playwright, audio dramatist and poet. Forty of her plays have been performed professionally and to critical acclaim around the UK and Australia. She has lectured in Playwriting and Screenwriting for Pen to Print and Canterbury Christ Church University and is a mentor at The Writing Coach. Her short psychological suspense Ebook Don’t Forget The Crazy is available on Amazon and other EBook platforms and her novella The Heart-Shaped Box is published in print and Ebook in January ’26.
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You can hear great new ideas, creative work and writing tips on Write On! Audio. Find us on all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Google Podcasts and Spotify. Type Pen to Print into your browser and look for our logo, or find us on Podcasters.Spotify.com.
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