Fasten your bonnets for this Regency romp

EMMA Theatre Royal Bath

- Jackie Chappell

THIS new staging of Jane Austen’s novel Emma is a playful Regency romp, and the perfect production with which to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the author and her years in Bath.

Indeed, on Tuesday night - and I suspect at other performances - members of the audience arrayed in period costume outnumbered the actors on stage.

Playwright Ryan Craig has based his loose comedy adaptation, set in 1815 in Surrey, on Austen’s own description - “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,’ she wrote.

And so Emma (well played by India Shaw-Smith, soon to be in TV's Spartacus: House of Ashur) is loud, spiteful and totally oblivious to the chaos she creates in her efforts to matchmake.