Eleanor Kane feels that the circle has somehow been closed now that she is on the road with Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Really lovely
00:07this afternoon to speak to Eleanor Kane, who is on the road with one of the best shows
00:12I've seen in the last couple of years. Fantastic is coming back to Chichester, it's also coming
00:16to Southampton, Pride and Prejudice brackets, sort of. Now that sort of is important, isn't
00:23it? It's not straight Jane Austen by any means, and yet it is, isn't it?
00:29Yes, it's the classic tale, Pride and Prejudice, very much turned on its head and told by,
00:36from the perspective of five maids, the kind of the upstairs, downstairs, the downstairs
00:42of the upstairs, downstairs, in this period world. And they are telling this story for
00:48the audience and putting on and off different costumes, playing all the different characters
00:55and giving it a little bit of a cheeky twist. A little bit of a cheeky twist, you're saying
01:02you take the humour that's in the Austen, but goodness, you heighten it a hundred times,
01:06thousand times? Yeah, I would say, yeah, we take what's already there, but we really,
01:12yeah, we really ham it up and it's full of fun, gags, a little bit of naughtiness, and
01:22lots of music, singing, dancing, loads of props and just general hilarity. We get lots
01:32and lots of laughs. You can genuinely say, can't you, that it is respectful of Austen, isn't it?
01:37Yes, it is. We actually use a lot of the original text, like the original text of the book and
01:44the script, you know, I would say half of the dialogue is actually Austen's original dialogue,
01:49and it is, that is what makes it such an amazing production, because it does,
01:52you know, have that real element of truth to her work, but we are also adding our own spin to it
02:01and making, and kind of reinvigorating it to a much wider audience, I think, who wouldn't normally
02:07enjoy Austen's work. Absolutely, so you get the Austen sceptics, those who don't know much about
02:13Austen at all, but you also get the aficionados, don't you? And you please all of them, which is
02:17quite some achievement. Yeah, yeah, we do. There's a couple of, there's a couple of jokes in
02:23it that are definitely a little nod to the ones that really know what they're talking about, you
02:28know. So that's really nice to get that specific laugh, you know, from people that were like, oh,
02:35I know that bit from the book or the TV series or the, whatever that is. So that's a really nice
02:41thing. And fantastic that you're in it, because it's almost fate that you should have been in it
02:45at some point. You so nearly did, but an email went astray. Tell the story. Yes, so I actually
02:55emailed in to audition for the show when I was a student back in 2017, so a long time ago, and I
03:05never got anything back, or the email got lost, and I thought, okay, whatever. And then
03:12many years later, March last year, I was in the audition process, and I said this to the director
03:17and writer, Isabel McArthur, and she was so mortified that they didn't get back to me,
03:24that she actually searched her email chain in the room and found out that they did send an email to
03:30me, but it got lost in my university's email chain, so I never actually got the audition,
03:40never got the invite to audition, and so it was a big full circle moment to actually get more.
03:47You could never, ever have known that they had properly actually replied.
03:51I know, I know, I know. It's so funny, and it was, I'm from Glasgow, and the show actually started,
03:56one of the first venues was at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, so it's actually quite a Scottish
04:02heavy show, and obviously the writer, Isabel's from Scotland, and yeah, so it was nice to
04:10do it like that. It feels quite homely to do the show.
04:15Absolutely, as you say, full circle. Well, Eleanor, really lovely to speak to you, very much looking forward to seeing it again.
04:20Have a great tour. Thank you. Thanks very much.