PRIDE AND JOY WITH KARAOKE AUSTEN

SITTING in a rehearsal room in front of Christina Gordon, as she fires off stern rebukes, in the guise of Jane Austen’s beady-eyed aristocrat Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is too much. The speech is being delivered in Gordon’s native Glaswegian accent, like a music hall turn.

It had been a tough day, and I wasn’t really in the mood for a laugh. But laugh I did. Gordon and her cast mates were rehearsing Isobel McArthur’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s 18th-century class-ridden romance Pride & Prejudice, re-titled Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).

The troupe, right, first performed the show at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre three years ago. Now, it’s getting a West End run, at the Criterion Theatre (with previews starting tonight). McArthur told me she read Austen’s masterpiece for the first time when she was 28, and was struck by the fact that it was ‘so funny’. ‘Then I watched all the television and film adaptations, and they were so unfunny,’ she recalled.

The result is a sort of karaoke Pride & Prejudice with a range of songs — including Kiki Dee and Elton John’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For A Hero.

Producer David Pugh said initially, artists were reluctant to grant the rights to their songs. But they released them once they saw how’d they’d be used.