To kick off our special series of articles on Austen, panto, and their presence in Britain today, our Artistic Director David Bullen takes a look at how Austen’s work has become increasingly mythic…
So, two centuries have passed with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the world. This landmark year has, therefore, made the novel’s presence in British culture more visible than ever, and what strikes me – as I, along with the rest of By Jove, embark on rehearsals for the return of Pride & Prejudice: The Panto – is the diverse ways in which Austen’s work continues to live on. Last year, I wrote a piece for the By Jove blog in response to the frequent question of ‘how is Pride and Prejudice a myth?’ My answer, now as then, was that a myth can be defined as a narrative that transcends a single source and has become part of popular consciousness. If this was ever in doubt for Austen’s novel, this year has proved it indefinitely.
At one end, we have the many Pride and Prejudice adaptations for both stage and screen. The BBC’s 1995 adaptation and the film version starring Keira Knightley ten years later continue to loom heavily in the background, but this year the theatre has been graced with multiple versions, including a production at the open air theatre in Regent’s Park. Even the concept of a Pride and Prejudice pantomime has moved beyond our efforts at the White Bear last year, with an American version in January and another in Bristol this Christmas.
These were and will be great shows, I’ve no doubt, but where our pantomime differs is in the way the novel is taken as both a story and as a myth – Austen herself appears as a character, and the panto unfolds as her attempt to write the novel anew. This actually reflects a lot of the recent, less directly adaptive Austen-inspired media. Following on from Lost in Austen in 2008, which saw a modern fan of the book fall into, and trade places with, Elizabeth Bennet, early this year we had Austenland. Based on Shannon Hale’s 2007 novel, the film follows a thirty-something New York woman who has an obsession with Mr Darcy as she holidays at a Jane Austen themed resort.
What is most interesting about Austenland is that its protagonist, Jane Hayes, is not so much obsessed with Mr Darcy in general, but specifically his embodiment as Colin Firth in the BBC version. Thus we can see how descendants of Austen’s novel now not only interact with the nineteenth century source, but with each other; it’s no longer a case of reciprocal, one way adaptations, but a matrix of connections that situates Austen’s work at its centre. In short, it’s evolved into a myth – and it’s not set to stop any time soon.
There’s a forthcoming television adaptation of P.D. James’s pseudo-sequel, Death Comes to Pemberley, and this in itself reveals but a fraction of the numerous literary sequels, adaptations, and appropriations of Austen’s novel – the most prominent of which in recent years has been Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We ought not to be complacent, however, about the implications of Austen’s work, and Austen, herself, becoming mythologised. The film version of Austenland was produced by Stephanie Meyer, most famous (or perhaps infamous) as the author of the Twilight series – which has brought a present day descendant of Mr Darcy, Edward Cullen, to millions around the globe. This vampiric Darcy is representative of all that’s dangerous about certain kinds of readings of Austen’s work – and again, it’s something we hope to parody this Christmas.
On a lighter note, check out this other branch of Austen’s mythic self. It parodies the exact kind of sexually charged, and sexually limiting, reading of Pride and Prejudice that created Twilight. It’s also bloody funny. Here’s hoping you’ll think the same of our panto when you come along in December. Go on, you know you want to.
