SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Northcott Theatre, Exeter

Life must be very depressing for the aspiring playwright. First the theatres were swamped by the live action equivalent of the Golden Oldies compilation album, the 'Buddy Holly's Hot Tap Blues Brothers Soul Sensation' phenomenon, heavy on yesteryear's pop hits and diaphanous on plot. And just as that brand of non-theatre starts to fizzle out, a rash of literary adaptations spreads like measles across Britain's theatres. It seems that there is very little room for original work when the writings of Austen and all the Brontes are there for the staging. Unfortunately, although these ladies make excellent novelists, as dramatists their work is sadly lacking.

The theatre, as actors are keen to point out, is a unique environment. It offers the potential for engagement, drama, the richness of direct empathy and (at its best) a kind of magic. However successful the adaptation - and this production of Sense and Sensibility is an excellent transposition of Ms Austen's book - a novel and a play are still two very different beasts, in terms of both structure and pacing. For all its enjoyability as a story, Sense and Sensibility therefore offers little that constitutes a truly 'theatrical' experience, and nothing that one couldn't get in spades by simply curling up with an old-fashioned printed copy. And unlike film and television adaptations - where the country houses, rolling hills and long nights of despair by candlelight can be brought out of the reader's mind and made flesh - the stage demands exactly the same imaginative effort required of a novel's reader. This means that most literary adaptations are, by their very nature, little more than an elaborate form of Jackanory for grown-ups.

Yet as literary adaptations go, Sense and Sensibility is a fine piece of work, nicely crafted by Mark Healy and intelligently staged with a consistently strong ensemble performance. Sara Griffiths' Eleanor serves as the solid and engaging core at the heart of a whirl of characters, whilst director Ben Crocker and designer Tim Heywood have been extremely inventive in using a single set to represent the host of locations covered by Ms Austen's book. Nonetheless, one is still left feeling as though one has watched the dramatic equivalent of a Reader's Digest Condensed Book. And wishing that such an abundance of talent, both on and off-stage, was lavishing its skills on a piece of 'real' theatre. The sort of thing that playwrights write.

TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE

Until 1 April (01392 493493), then touring to Westcliff, Cambridge, Coventry and Basingstoke.