It’s a Regency feast for eyes and ears

REVIEW: Emma – Malvern Theatres (Monday, October 13 to Saturday, October 18).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * * *

PROPELLED along with pace, sporting enough empire line dresses to pack a frock shop, and featuring the obligatory Jane Austen character of the clapped-out father figure, this is a winner right from the first attack of the vapours.

Yes, it’s a comedy of the most impeccable manners, even if much of the exchanges are as sharp as a well-soused herring.

And just in case you wondered, never mind the downdraughts of any number of heaving bosoms, just watch those prone male pectorals also rising and falling in the manner of Nelson’s ships ploughing the high seas.

Theatre Royal Bath has certainly done birthday girl Jane – an amazing 250 candles on the cake this year, folks – exceeding proud, egad.

Having personally endured Pride and Prejudice for O-level sometime around the end of the last Ice Age, I can say without a shadow of doubt that my English master ‘Stonewall’ Jackson certainly knew a thing or two about La Austen’s command of her native tongue.

And that’s because the novelist’s ornate language flows gloriously onwards, like the waters of a stream that - while encountering any number of pebbles along the way, plus the occasional boulder - effortlessly holds the attention throughout.

For this new stage adaptation by Ryan Craig is a sheer delight, a Regency feast for eyes and ears that makes one yearn for more and yet more of the same.

These days, William Chubb’s widower Mr Woodhouse would have long vanished into his shed sanctuary, where he could escape the dense fog of oestrogen engulfing the family home. Of course, they didn’t have train sets or tropical fish tanks back in those days, but no doubt there existed some other equally effective distraction.

Sadly though, there doesn’t appear to be a bolthole available in the Woodhouse household, so poor, persecuted papa wearily stumbles about at every social engagement wearing an ill-fitting wig that looks like an off cut from Robert Martin’s (Daniel Rainford) sheep shearing pen.

Emma (India Shaw-Smith), is of course, a scheming little tyke intent on matchmaking to such an extent that her own marital expectations are very much in the shade.

Mind you, she’s still a right little flirt, playing with men’s affections in a time when even a stolen peck on the cheek might be regarded by polite society as being the equivalent of a Roman orgy.

No wonder then that the sexual tension builds with the splintering intensity of a corset stricken with whalebone fatigue. Indeed, you can cut the air with a knife as suitors George Knightley (Ed Sayer), Philip Elton (Oscar Batterham) and Frank Churchill (Peter Losasso) cruise this genteel pond like so many mate-hungry frogs in spring.

Elsewhere, Harriet Smith (Maiya Louise Thapar) is an absolute hoot, collapsing all over the place, while Jane Fairfax (Jade Kennedy) is demure belong belief, exactly the kind of girl you could take home to meet mum with tea on the lawn.

And then there’s Augusta Hawkins (Rose Quentin) who can rarely get through a night at the ball without needing to sit down all flustered and needing to be revived with smelling salts.

Oh yes. I loved every ludicrous moment of this Austen classic, and director Stephen Unwin is to be congratulated on the way he has taken what might have been a chunk of period stodge and turned it into a repast fit for a king.

And talking of royalty takes us back to the queen of all she surveys, star of the show Ms India Shaw-Smith, whose shrill-voiced romantic efforts are ringing in our ears long after the final curtain and the well-deserved encores that must surely follow.