When Madeline Austin saw a live adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice” last year at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, Jane Austen’s humor and wit leapt from the stage — they were even more prominent than they had been in the books.
So, Austin acknowledged, she had to mount the adaptation at her own Compass Rose Theater, the professional teaching theater where she was named artistic director in June.
It just so happens that this year marks Austen’s 250th birthday. (She was born Dec. 16, 1775.) And that the playwright, Emma Whipday, is named for the heroine of another Austen work.
Whipday, an English playwright and lecturer at Newcastle University specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, said she was exposed to Austen’s work from a young age.
“I think it was one of those novels that my mum pressed on me and just said, ‘You have to read this,’” Whipday said. “The thing that I really fell in love with about her work is the combination of really beautiful, moving love stories that are tightly plotted and keep you page turning to find out what happens to the central characters, but combined with this fully realized social world where every character sort of leaps off the page through their dialogue, and you feel like you’ve just stepped into this other time and place.”
She added her appreciation for Austen’s family dynamics and the intricate, clockwork-like quality her plots have. Before “Pride & Prejudice,” Whipday also adapted her namesake book, Austen’s “Emma” and “Sense and Sensibility.”
“Pride & Prejudice” follows Elizabeth Bennet as she discovers love and navigates social mores, all the while surrounded by her four sisters, mother and father. Caleigh Riordan Davis plays the character in Compass Rose’s upcoming run.
“Part of it was just, selfishly, I wanted to … get to step inside the novels that way, and get the privilege of living alongside those characters,” Whipday said. “I don’t think I felt like the adaptations that exist are lacking in any way … but I suppose I wanted to see if it was possible to create an adaptation that would be able to follow the plot, follow the characters, and keep as much of the spirit of the original alive, so that audience members who came to it for the first time had what they experienced as the novel brought to them.”
Whipday said some other adaptations take liberties to work onstage, like combining two of the sisters into one, so Whipday made it a goal for herself to keep those elements intact. She also focused on ideas like the meaning of home, family relationships, and how one’s role within the family develops.
She also felt that Austen tried to see the best in her characters and wanted to make sure that came across in her script.
“Mrs. Bennet is often played as an overbearing mother trying to marry her daughters off. I think I brought this sense of, ‘Gosh, the stress of having five daughters in a world where women couldn’t earn a living.’ That’s terrifying. ‘How can you equip your girls to be OK in the world?’” Whipday said. “The central love story, because we see it so much from Lizzie’s perspective in the novel, Mr. Darcy has to seem quite unlikable to the reader, because that’s how we’re seeing it, but obviously, on stage, you can see them both and see what they’re both going through. And so I wanted to give a little bit more of his awkwardness, his introversion, his difficulty in being in groups.”
Austin said that, on top of the humor, the adaptation skillfully makes the story more digestible for modern audiences.
“It really cut to the heart of the novel,” Austin said. “Sometimes there’s a lot of exposition, and I thought it was interesting how Emma could cut some of the exposition, but it [still] smoothly followed the characters, so you could know ‘who was this,’ ‘who was that,’ and that you could follow the plot line easily, even if you had never read Jane Austen before.”
Looking back on Austen’s 250th birthday, both Whipday and Austin expressed that they wished she had been able to write more before she died at the age of 41. Despite having written only six books, with one more left unfinished, Austen’s impact as an author can still be felt to this day.
“The other thing that’s really exciting to me about how Austen’s novels are being celebrated in this way and are enduring in this way is that they are romantic. I think romance novels tend to be the bottom of the pile in terms of people’s judgments of them, especially if people have a literary background,” Whipday said. “And yet, Jane Austen is at the heart of the academic establishment, and everyone recognizes how wonderful she is.”
“Pride & Prejudice” at Compass Rose Theater opens on Nov. 14 and runs through Dec. 14. Tickets are available on Compass Rose’s website.
The theater just wrapped up a production of “Annie,” which was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award, which recognizes theater excellence in the Washington, D.C., region. It’s the ninth nomination the theater has received. It will produce “Rent” and a cabaret show in the first half of next year to close out its 2025-26 season.
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