Why I Made is a fortnightly online only interview series where artists and writers share the behind-the-scenes stories of their creations.
Penny Ashton, comedian, actor, poet, wedding celebrant and podcaster, has travelled New Zealand and the world for more than two decades, performing her one-woman, laugh-out-loud adaptations of Jane Austen’s books.
There might be something serendipitous about that, given she has an ancestral link to the real-life figure said to have inspired Austen’s most famous leading man, Mr Darcy (more on that later).
But last year, Ashton did something a little different and adapted Sense and Sensibility for a full-length show at Christchurch’s Court Theatre, where a six-strong cast played 24 characters.
“It was the first-time I’ve ever written on a book,” she says. “I got an old copy of Sense and Sensibility - it had a very 1970s cover - so I didn’t feel so bad about marking bits and pieces.”
Ashton’s “rambunctious rewrite” now heads to Wellington’s Circa Theatre – only this time, Ashton is also directing. It’s been 21 years since she was last in a rehearsal room working on a scripted play with anyone other than herself and director Ben Crowder; it’s also the biggest production she has directed.
She’s staying true to the source material about the three Dashwood sisters, Elinor, Marianne and Margaret, and their widowed mother, Mrs Dashwood. The quartet find themselves destitute and homeless because English inheritance laws of the day rule that their brother, John, is the beneficiary of their father’s will and he isn’t inclined to help them. It means marrying well is the only means the three sisters have of keeping the wolves from the door.
Why did you decide to make Sense and Sensibility into a full-length play?
PA: The Court’s then artistic director, Daniel Pengelly, was watching the UK National Theatre’s Jane Eyre during the first lockdown [in 2020] and he asked if I might be interested in adapting a 19th-century novel for the stage. I thought he might have wanted a Brontë novel but I find them quite sad. They seem to be all about people burning to death in attics; I’ve always preferred Jane Austen.
Years ago, when I was on an OE in London, I went to the movies by myself, and saw Sense and Sensibility at the Empire in Leicester Square on this giant screen and I went, “OMG!” I loved everything about it - the costumes, the language and the story – and the cast just smashed it.
Sense and Sensibility starts with the Dashwood sisters and their mother facing homelessness because they cannot afford a place of their own and must rely on male relatives – or husbands – for financial support.
Austen’s work is as witty and relevant as ever; after all, housing insecurity and homelessness continue to cause problems for women. Period drama is also very easy to lampoon, ever so gently.
Is it true that you didn’t like Jane Austen when you were initially introduced to her novels at high school in Christchurch?
PA: Yes, there was a long time when I wasn’t interested in Austen at all. I went to Canterbury University to study science and English, but all of the exams clashed, and I thought to myself, “What am I doing? I don’t want to work in a lab.” I loathed the English lectures.
I found it twatty as, really twatty, reading every, single thing into some piece of text. At the time, I thought, “maybe I’m a bit stupid?” I couldn’t see all the layers, I found it quite tedious and thought, “maybe it’s beyond me”. I switched to drama instead. I did 14 shows in three years, choreographed the law reviews and was in all the capping reviews. The first comedy competitions I went to were in 1993 – we used to have university comedy competitions – and people like Rhys Darby, Chris Brain, Jo Randerson, Duncan Sarkies, Radar, Jesse Griffin and Adam Gardiner were there. That talent pool! It was kinda amazing. I loved university; I loved doing all those shows because you start to find your tribe more.
It wasn’t until I saw Sense and Sensibility in London that I got the appeal of Austen.
What were you doing in London for work during your OE?
PA: I didn’t perform for three years. I worked as a temp for the Conservative Party. I had this interview – I was a temp but I still had to have an interview – and they said, “what do you know about the Conservative party?” and it was just after Tony Blair had won and I said, “You lost?” We had very different politics; we never talked about politics. I hadn’t quite developed my fully rampant “leftiness” at the time; I’d never consider working for the Tories now.
So, what issues are you interested in now?
PA: Women’s rights are always important to me. All my shows have a feminist bent, especially when I stopped to think about things like prostitution which really started to ferment with my first show, Hot Pink Bits. All these men used prostitutes for centuries but women are the ones who bear the brunt of the shame.
Have you found through doing these shows, and particularly Jane Austen, it makes you even more feminist?
PA: Yes, like so much, so much! I’ve anther one-woman show called Olive Copperbottom, based on women from Charles Dickens’ books. When I started researching Dickens, I saw the difference in the way he and Austen were treated. The man’s output was prodigious; he was 53 when he died – so quite young, she was 41 – but she would have published so much more if she hadn’t had to fight to get published.
I like her stories, but I like her story. It’s quite tragic, she died at 41 – in 1817 – and she’d only managed to get published in 1811; she invented a new style of narrative. She was one of the first proponents of the free indirect speech, which isn’t dialogue in quotation marks, but more like internal monologues. In adapting Sense and Sensibility, one of the biggest challenges was inventing the dialogue because so much of the book is internal thoughts.
So, Austen was inventing this new style of working but was so restricted in her life. She couldn’t even leave the house without a chaperone; she wasn’t allowed to get a job because it was regarded as “unseemly”, so she writes what she knows really well, invents a style of narrative, is hilarious – her irony and satire, I love her spinster shade – but then what’s happened, when her books are produced it’s just relegated as “women’s stuff”. So often things that centre around women are “women’s interest” but things that involve men are everyone’s.
Why did you decide on an all-woman cast for your production of Sense and Sensibility?
PA: For all the reasons above!
What’s the connection between your family and Jane Austen?
PA: In 2013, just as I launched Promise and Promiscuity, my Uncle David – who’s the one in our family who does all the family history – emailed to say that I am the fifth great-niece of Thomas Langlois Lefroy, who is rumoured to have been the inspiration for Mr Darcy.
He wrote, “You seem to be doing a lot about Jane Austen but you might be curious to know you might be related to her lover.” It’s a bit of a stretch to describe Lefroy that way - there’s very little evidence that they had any sort of relationship - so it could all be wild conjecture, but we run with it for publicity purposes.
Sense and Sensibility is at Circa Theatre, July 6-August 3.
