SENSE AND SENSIBILITY – REVIEW OF 2025 STRATFORD FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas 

The Stratford Festival has taken the bold step of adapting Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for the stage and putting it on at the Festival Theatre. Austen’s novels have been the basis of many art forms but capturing her ineffable prose and the rituals of Regency England has never been easy. The current production by Kate Hamill is “based on the novel by Jane Austen” and is not referred to as an adaptation. There may be a clue there as to what we should expect.

You may recall that Sense and Sensibility is about Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters who are left destitute by virtue of the law of entailment. On the death of Mr. Dashwood, his property can only be inherited by a male heir, his son, and nothing goes to his wife or daughters. The decent Mr. Dashwood has his son John promise to support Mrs. Dashwood, and he intends to do it until his wife objects and forces him to give nothing to them.

Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters move to a cottage provided by Sir John Middleton, a generous cousin and live in genteel poverty searching for husbands for Elinor, the eldest, and her younger sister Marianne. Margaret is too young for that mission.

The eligible bachelors are Edward Ferrars, John Willloughby and Colonel Brandon Thomas. Complications arise with all three to keep us watching for about two and a half hours until things are sorted out in a true Austen form. The young ladies do find husbands and we all live happily ever after.

That is the barebones of the plot that we read about in Austen’s elegant prose accompanied by the graceful rituals and civilized manners of Regency England. Hamill and Director Daryl Cloran pay scant attention to Austen and try to provide us with a production that is partly farce, partly brisk theatre and a result that can generously be classified as unsatisfactory.

Cloran uses 15 actors to play 22 roles. Of these roles 5 are called Gossip #1 to #5. The five Gossips are kept very busy. They are on stage for much of the performance and chatter, run on and off the stage, move furniture, engage in dialogue, scream, screech, and make other noises. They also crawl on the floor pretending to be dogs. In short, they provide more annoyance than one can bear. They have colourful costumes with feathers on their hats and if you can imagine all the acts enumerated in the previous sentence have been done numerous times you may conclude that they have no place in a play based on Austen and ask why in the world they are on stage. 

(l to r) Jade V. Robinson as Margaret Dashwood, Jessica B. Hill as 
Elinor Dashwood and Glynis Ranney as Mrs. Dashwood. Photo: David Hou 

They deserve credit for doing what they were supposed to do, and their names are: Christopher Allen, Jenna-Lee Hyde, Ashley Dingwel (on the night that I saw the performance but usually played by Celia Aloma), Jesse Gervais and Julie Lumsden.

The centre of attention are Elinor (Jessica B. Hill) and Marianne (Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane). They are romantic, innocent and lovely except when Cloran makes them act idiotically. Elinor falls in love with the honorable Edward Ferrars (Thomas Duplessie who also plays Robert Fearrars) who is shy and awkward. Cloran unfortunately makes him into a stuttering and bumbling fool, almost strictly a comic figure. John Wlloughby (Andrew Chown who also plays John Dashwood) is the cad that misleads Marianne into falling in love with him. But we do have Colonel Brandon Thomas (Shane Carty), the upstanding gentleman who wins Mariane’s heart.

We have seventeen characters to deal with aside from the five Gossips. Seana McKenna doubles as the garrulous and funny Mrs. Jennings and the almost speechless but comic Mrs. Ferrars.  Steve Ross plays Sir John Middleton, and he is not given much of a chance as a comic and the Doctor and there are no laughs in him. Glynis Ranney plays Mrs. Dashwood, the mother of the three girls as well as Anne Steele. Jade V. Robinson gives an exuberant performance as Margaret, the teenage sister.

There are a number of settings for the play, from the Dashwood cottage to Sir John’s residence, to London and some outdoor scenes. People go for a walk and instead of having them stroll around the stage, Cloran has them bop up and down in one spot. There are numerous frames for people to step in and out of rooms or doors and they are not always clear or necessary. During the outside walks the Gossips walk around the perimeter of the stage holding stalks of flowers.

Set and costume designer Dana Osborne provides numerous pieces of furniture on wheels which are easily wheeled on and off the stage by the Gossips or other characters. The costumes are fine except for the three sisters wearing very similar dresses in the early scenes. Presumably it is mourning attire and as far as we can tell their father just died. His corpse fell on the tea table from above and startled everyone. It is wrapped in a sheet and tossed off the stage.

There it is, a confusing production that strives for laughs and does get some. To be fair to Hamill by basing the play on the novel rather than adapting it for the stage, she may have had no intention of being faithful to Austen at all. That may be fair enough, but I suspect many people were drawn to the play because they thought they were getting Jane Austen’s novel in a different form. If that was Hamill’s intent, she should have warned us with changing the title to, say, Sense and Sensibility, Maybe or some such variation.
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Sense and Sensibility by Kate Hamill based on the novel by Jane Austen continues until October 2025 at the Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The Greek Press