The extraordinary posthumous career of Jane Austen — a modest success in her short lifetime and a spectacular juggernaut of culture today — as she enters her third century is one of the greatest underdog stories in literary history. With little more than her humble credo that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,” Austen has conquered not only the entire known novel-reading world but also the cinema and now, it would appear, the stage. Beginning on Thursday, November 30, and running until December 17, Ensemble Theatre Company will present the latest in a seemingly unending stream of Austen artifacts, Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s original drama Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley.
The play, which received a rolling world premiere in 2016, takes up the story of the characters established in Pride and Prejudice approximately two years later as they gather at Pemberley, the lavish estate of Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Darcy, née Bennet. Inserted among the usual Pride suspects — Jane and Charles Bingley, Lydia Bennet Wickham, Mary Bennet, and the gloriously pompous Lady Catherine de Bourgh — there’s a relative newcomer, Lady Catherine’s scholarly nephew, Arthur de Bourgh, who happens to be in line to inherit Rosings, Lady Catherine’s substantial property.
As anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with Austen’s novel will know, young men who stand to inherit “good fortunes” are inevitably in want of something, and it’s not a landscape architect. This is where Mary Bennet comes in. As the quietly moralizing and “bookish” Bennet, she played a minor, mostly comic role in the original novel. In Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, as the last unmarried Bennet sister, Mary necessarily steps into the spotlight — ready or not. Speaking with the play’s director, Andrew Barnicle, I learned that one of the script’s chief virtues is that it does a “magnificent job of re-creating Austen’s prose style in dialogue,” a reassurance that will have Austen fans heaving a sigh of anticipatory relief. “The characters fight,” he said, “but they do so in such a wonderfully polite way that it’s often quite funny,” which is very much the idiom of the original narrator’s archly dry and subtly wicked sense of humor.