The Stage

Emma

Published Friday 3 July 2009 at 16:05 by Pat Ashworth

Open-air venues without fixed seating have to get the orientation right. It might have been fine on the picnic chairs at the front of the long rectangle of audience at Nottingham Castle, but for those towards the back, it was a bit like looking through a telescope. That wouldn’t have mattered so much for a knockabout sort of drama, but Emma needs engagement at close quarters. This isn’t really an outdoor play.

But Peter Mimmack’s adaptation is neat and playful nevertheless, imaginatively and, at times, comically staged, with the minimum of props. He chooses romanticism as a device to bring in painters and portraits as commentary on the manners of the day, so picture frames become a narrative tool and portraits themselves stand in for absent group members.

It means that a cast of five, who each take on up to five parts, can even dance two sets of a quadrille and play their own partners, which is great fun. Erika Sanderson is the most impressive. She manages to find a different regional accent and persona for each of her roles, and gives a particularly memorable performance as a garrulous Welsh Miss Bates.

Holly Beth Morgan holds it all together as the heroine, Kimberley Wintle is a delightfully distracted Harriet Smith and James Merry and Duncan Wigman play all the men with aplomb. Highlights include Mr Elton’s surprise proposal in a bumpy coach interior, but the real dramatic intensity comes with a flourish in the last ten minutes.