The acclaimed Salisbury Playhouse will be visiting the Queen's Theatre, Barnstaple with a luminous adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel Northanger Abbey from Tuesday 2nd to Saturday 6th October.
Catherine Morland is hopelessly addicted to macabre romance novels that wreak havoc on her imagination. When she leaves her quiet, bookish, country life in Hampshire to be taken, as a companion, to enter the leisure society at Bath, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Here she meets the duplicitous Thorpe siblings, Isabella and John, together with Eleanor Tilney and her brother Henry, the suave and sardonic clergyman with whom she begins to fall in love.
An invitation from the wealthy but avaricious General Tilney to Henry's ancestral home, Northanger Abbey, fuels Catherine's deepening obsession with the gothic. Intensified by her reading of gloriously horrible novels, Catherine's suspicions about the terrifying General Tilney and hidden secrets at Northanger Abbey grow, until her mind is so dominated by fantasy that the edges of fiction and reality begin to blur.
Capturing Austen's incomparable irony and acerbic comment, Tim Luscombe's perfectly tuned adaptation evokes a time of high-tea in fashionable Bath and an era when it was perfectly plausible for an Abbey to hold secrets so dangerous and mysterious that they could have been lifted from the very pages of one of Catherine's beloved novels.
Tim Luscombe, who adapted the novel for the stage, will direct the piece. An acclaimed director whose productions have played in the West End and on Broadway, his recent credits include A Chorus of Disapproval, the Mill at Sonning; Relative Values, Savoy; Private Lives (starring Joan Collins), Aldwych; The One You Love, The Royal Court. As a director Tim is renowned for his strong sense of comedy and his productions are accessible and refreshing.
Devon actor Ben Righton plays Catherine's devoted brother James Morland who becomes smitten with the duplicitous Isabella Thorpe (played by Emma Hamilton). Ben has recently completed a stint in the West End in R.C Sherriff's Journey's End which later transferred to Broadway. Our heroine with the big imagination, Catherine Morland is played to perfection by Jennie Maitland. Her romantic interest Henry Tilney is played by Gregory Finnegan and his sister Eleanor by by Helen Bradbury. The cast is completed by Christine Cox as Mrs Allen, Dominic Gerrard as John Thorpe and Terry Taplin as General Tilney.
Design is by Colin Falconer, lighting by Hansjorg Schmidt with music and movement by Matthew Bugg.
Salisbury Playhouse is one of Britain's leading regional theatres with an ever growing reputation of producing drama of the highest quality. Their previous production, Jamaica Inn which played to packed houses in Barnstaple in June 2005 captured all the excitement of the original book. -- www.dodgetheatre.com
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