Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) review — an irreverent but overlong look at Jane Austen

★★★☆☆
There’s fun a-plenty, but when you’re watching Isobel McArthur’s take on Jane Austen it’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Laura Wade’s recent foray into similar territory in her mischievous adaptation of that unfinished Austen novel, The Watsons.

McArthur’s script, mixing bawdy anachronisms with a sprinkling of karaoke-ish pop songs, certainly has its charms, but it’s also excessively padded out. Wade was wittier and sleeker.

Context makes all the difference too. If you were to see this irreverent, all-female comedy on a late night at the Edinburgh Fringe, you would forgive the longueurs and throw yourself into the mosh pit of boozy, raunchy humour. In the West End, the play — directed by McArthur and Simon Harvey and first seen at the Tron in