Scots production show Pride and Prejudice as never seen before

Pride & Prejudice is the second collaboration between McArthur’s Blood of the Young theatre company and Glasgow’s Tron Theatre following last year’s Daphne Oram’s Wonderful World of Sound.

Blood of the Young’s artistic director Paul Brotherston will again direct, with McArthur returning to the stage after impressing with her portrait of Oram, a once-overlooked pioneer of electronic music.

McArthur will play both Mrs Bennett, the hypochondriac mother of protagonist Ehlizabeth, and Darcy, Elizabeth’s egotistical love interest. Meghan Tyler, Christina Gordon, Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Tori Burgess will perform alongside the playwright, who says she tackled the adaptation like a brainteaser – often to avoid characters falling in love with themselves.

“When you’re adapting a novel like this, you have to create something efficient which allows you to tell the whole story,” McArthur says. “I had wee colour pen lids for the actors, so I could play it all out in my head.

“Inevitably there are strands that do present themselves as being more important and other characters maybe get combined into one. And often the way it’s written is because someone has to go off and change their costume and come back as someone else.”

Having an all-women cast was an element McArthur and Brotherston, whose company is currently the inaugural company-in-residence at the National Theatre of Scotland, imposed on themselves in an attempt to stretch their talented cast. Playing a complicated, multi-faceted character such as Darcy is an opportunity rarely afforded to young female actors, McArthur says. “One of the things you almost never get to do is hold a still, silent and strong central position in a story,” she says. “A place where you can be mysterious and moody and command a lot of attention without necessarily having to create a lot of noise. So many plays written in a conventional sense just don’t offer that.”

McArthur continues: “I can say from experience, as an actor out of drama school who is in her 20s and is a woman, that if you’re lucky enough to get auditioned, it’ll be for the ingenue or the ‘other woman’ who briefly lures the man away from his wife, or the trophy wife. Or else it’ll be for someone who quickly gets murdered.”

At the centre of Pride and Prejudice are the five Bennett sisters, cloistered in their drawing room and middle-class mores. McArthur’s play takes in the voices from below-stairs too: each of the actors is also part of a Greek chorus of servants.

“These novels are invariably about the upper or middle classes, with servants very much on the periphery,” says McArthur. “But they are always there. They hear what everyone is saying, they know all the gossip, they are ever-present.

You couldn’t do anything in that world without servants, you needed them. Jane Austen couldn’t have written this novel without someone else emptying the chamber pot.”

Adapted countless times and immeasurably influential, Austen’s comedy of manners is one of the most familiar – and funny – there is. “There’s a particular kind of awfulness in social situations when people pretend to be something that they’re not, and that’s still funny,” says McArthur. “That makes me think of something like Ricky Gervais’s The Office, with people trying to hard to get something right, and in doing so, getting it so terribly wrong.”

She adds: “That’s what Jane Austen does really well, she sets up human beings as looking utterly foolish the moment they try and make themselves look good. And that’s incredibly funny.”

June 28 to July 14, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 7.45pm, Jul 7 mat 2.30pm, £9 to £17, concs available. Tel: 0141 552 4267. www.tron.co.uk www.bloodoftheyoung.org