Potted Pride and Prejudice comes to the Chichester Fringe this year for a date at Chichester City Arts Centre on Wednesday, June 4 from 19:45-20:30, promising all the fun and charm of Austen.
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00:00Good afternoon. My name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely to
00:07speak to Nadia Henwood again. Now, Nadia, you're doing a remarkable thing to Jane Austen. You are
00:11potting her, aren't you? You are potting Pride and Prejudice, to offer Potted Pride and Prejudice
00:16as part of the Chichester Fringe this year on Wednesday, June the 4th at Chichester City Arts
00:23Centre. Now tell me then, what is the attraction of potting? And maybe first explain what the
00:29processes of potting an author. Right. Okay. Well, potting is the idea of turning a huge thing
00:38into something very small and digestible for people. So the whole process is actually picking
00:47out all the funny bits of the book, all the characters that are meaningful to everyone
00:55and putting them all in and also using only a few actors to cover all the characters. So
01:04we've got four actors playing, I think it's 14 different characters.
01:08And so what remains of Jane Austen in this, would you say? What do you capture that is
01:13essentially her?
01:14Not a lot of Jane Austen because I believe, I mean, I'm a huge Jane Austen fan. And I think
01:23she's a genius in her writing, really. So a lot of the dialogue is the original Austen dialogue
01:29that was written in the book. So wherever possible, I've kept it. And I've kept it exactly as she wrote
01:36it.
01:37Sounds great. And it sounds like the most impossible logic puzzle. You've got to determine which characters
01:43you've got to keep. And what's the most important dialogue, haven't you, whilst retaining the spirit
01:48of the original?
01:49Exactly.
01:50How do you set about that then?
01:53Well, for me, because I'd already written the full length, I'd already done an adaptation of the full
02:01length play. So I actually chose which scenes were most important, which scenes I could ditch,
02:08which people had to be in it, and how, obviously, in the original one, there might have been maybe
02:15six people on stage, I had to make sure that I could only have four at the most, and that the person
02:20playing the two different people couldn't be on stage at the same time, playing two different
02:25people. So sometimes it meant different people saying different things in order to still bring
02:31that piece of dialogue in.
02:33Oh, fantastic. And as I'm teasing you just now, if Jane Austen floated in at the back during the
02:38performance, do you think she would be quietly amused then?
02:42I absolutely do. First of all, she'd be very pleased that her own words were still kept in,
02:47and that the whole plot still actually still occurs from start to finish. And I think she'd be quite
02:55amused by four actors trying to do all those different characters. Yeah, I think she'd love it.
03:02Well, lovely to hear that as part of the fringe is Potted Pride and Prejudice, adapted and reduced
03:09by Nadia Edward at the Chitterster City Arts Centre on Wednesday, June the 4th, and also back in
03:16Worthing in September. Nadia, really lovely to speak to you. Thank you.
03:21Okay, thank you.