Austentatious review: Regency ridiculousness at its improvised best

★★★★★

Austentatious is one of those rare Fringe shows that has managed to transcend the festival itself, finding a life in the West End and on tour around the UK. Having finally seen it, I can confidently say it deserves every bit of the hype.

Taking the framework of Jane Austen and throwing it entirely into the hands of its audience, Austentatious creates a brand-new Regency tale every performance from a title suggested by the crowd. It is a deceptively simple premise, but one that requires extraordinary confidence from its performers. Within seconds, a world of eligible bachelors, formidable families, social scandal and barely concealed longing begins to form, all invented before our eyes.

The company of five actors leap between an ever-expanding collection of characters with remarkable ease. There are shades of Mr Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet and practically every other Austen archetype imaginable, but the joy is watching those familiar ingredients mutate into something increasingly ridiculous. My performance somehow gave us a not-so-secretly evil, oil-covered Andrew Lloyd Webber, a magnificently withering Elaine Paige, and the Parker family, headed, naturally, by mother Sarah Jessica Parker. The speed with which such completely absurd ideas are accepted, embellished and woven into the increasingly elaborate story is where Austentatious is at its funniest.

The mere concept of Paige heroically removing an impaled croquet mallet in the name of making that final show is so gloriously deranged that it may remain lodged in my mind for considerably longer than the mallet itself.

Trying to explain the plot in any meaningful way is almost pointless. It is elaborate, convoluted and gloriously disposable, existing for one audience and one audience only. What matters is how astonishingly well the cast keep its increasingly tangled threads alive. Characters disappear and unexpectedly return, throwaway remarks become major plot points and ludicrous ideas somehow acquire the weight of great Regency melodrama.

Yet some of the biggest laughs come when those threads begin to fray. A character name is forgotten. Someone appears without the costume piece that was supposed to tell everyone who they are. A fellow performer spots the mistake and there is a flicker of panic before the entire company folds it seamlessly back into the story. Rather than puncturing the illusion, these moments make Austentatious even more delightful. We are watching five performers simultaneously write, direct and rescue a play in real time.

Crucially, the joke is never simply that Jane Austen is old fashioned. The company understands the rhythm, language and social architecture of her novels well enough to parody the form without flattening it. The clipped propriety, romantic yearning and obsession with status are played with enough sincerity that the eventual descent into complete nonsense becomes even funnier.

Austentatious has become a Fringe institution for good reason. It is clever without ever becoming smug, technically impressive without showing off, and enormously funny without needing to force a punchline into every second. The particular story I watched will never exist again, which is perhaps its greatest pleasure.

Five stars, and long may the bonnets, betrayals and completely unnecessary croquet injuries continue.

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 Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel

Until August 16th

1250-1400

Underbelly Bristo Square - McEwan Hall

Tickets Here