The week in theatre: Northanger Abbey; The Most Precious of Goods – review

Orange Tree, Richmond; Marylebone theatre, London
Zoe Cooper’s vivaciously queer take on Jane Austen will make readers and audiences think twice. And Nicolas Kent distils a Holocaust fable to its chilling bare bones

What a whirligig of talent there is in the Orange Tree’s Northanger Abbey. Of all kinds: writing, acting, directing. Skittering, parodying, excavating, bouncing lightly on ribboned shoes. Yet what eventual seepage of energy, not because too little is on offer but because too much is going on in too many directions – and for too long.

Zoe Cooper is not the first dramatist to unbutton Jane Austen’s verbal bodice. Three years ago Isobel McArthur brilliantly lit up the stage by bringing class consciousness and karaoke to the Bennet family and their servants in Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Still, Cooper must be the first to queer the bonneted one on stage. She is not saying that Austen’s early novel – usually thought of as the account of an ingenue’s awakening and a satire on gothic fiction – is actually all gay, but responding to a particular thread of feeling. The vivacity of Tessa Walker’s production shows she is on to something.

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