The most popular of Jane Austen’s novels is getting the stage treatment. Witty, highly-quotable, and oozing with romance, Pride & Prejudice will grace Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s stage.
Directed by Sara Clark and adapted by playwright Kate Hamill, the work has been hailed as “unlike any adaptation of Jane Austen one has seen before.”
In a director’s note, Clark writes that Hamill wanted to take female-centric classics and write them for modern audiences. And what better place to start than with Austen — an author whose work, despite being one of the most beloved and widely-read women authors of her time, has mostly been adapted to the stage by men?
Clark writes that, personally, what she loves about Hamill’s take is that it mines at something often missed by screen and stage treatments: “how FUNNY Jane Austen was and how keen her satire of the society in which she lived.”
Revisit the tale of headstrong Elizabeth Bennet and the aloof Mr. Darcy as they frustratingly deny their obvious chemistry, letting romantic (and sexual) tension run high. In case you don’t know the ending to this 1813 novel, we won’t give it away — but it’s a happy one.
Through March 28. $38-$66. Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, 1195 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, cincyshakes.com.
