It is a truth universally acknowledged that the personal letters of a notable literary figure can be an illuminating insight into their thoughts and give us a vivid image of their character. Going by this recital of Jane Austen's selected personal letters, therefore, you would think the woman an incorrigible bore. Even if more interesting letters had been selected, what is the point of watching them performed instead of reading them? How dramatic can 50 minutes of letter reading be even when the material is exciting?
And it is really unexciting. Uncontained Arts have looked at the corpus of Austen, a novelist of enormous wit, psychological, and social insight, and chosen to take from it a series of dull accounts. What offends most about this choice is that the popular conception of Austen's novels as just a silly sequence of frivolous gossip-mongering around social events is unhelpful enough and yet it seems to be precisely this image of Austen that seems to so delight our performers. Thus we have the young Jane's recounting of her nascent crushes and provincial social mingling, performed by two actors in bonnets who alternate sections presumably because one actor doing it would have melted our eyeballs with boredom. They brightly chorus the signature of Austen, ‘J.A.’, after every single letter with a maddeningly smug regularity. The problem here is that this is a record of events, not thoughts, while it is Austen's thoughts that might interest us and not her pretty everyday everyday life.
The performances are driven by the maxim that highly active eyebrows can make leaden material more interesting. They actually make it more irritating. The delivery, similarly, is so bright and chirpy to make up for the quotidian banality that one might be lead to fear for Jane's stability. They attempt to break up the tedium with Victorian comic songs, but being Victorian they are themselves pretty tedious and of the ‘Whoops, You Left The Oven On, Mrs Brown’ variety. Incidental music is also provided, a wash of elevator muzak.
I would at least applaud the performers' enthusiasm, but since the letters are being read off printed sheets I can't even credit them the effort to learn their lines. This whole affair tells us nothing new about a great author and, worse than that, insults her by perpetuating her worst stereotypes. If you're an Austen fan, the letters are all free online. Knock yourselves out, don't get knocked out by this.
