Frances Poet on adapting Sense and Sensibility for the stage - 'If Marianne was alive today she'd be over-sharing on social media'

When the Glasgow-based writer Frances Poet first read Jane Austen’s 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility, she was a young teenager; and she confesses that in those days she was “all Marianne”, greatly impressed by the impulsive, rebellious and romantic character of the younger of the two sisters at the centre of Jane Austen’s first published book.

Like its acclaimed successor Pride and Prejudice, which followed two years later, Sense and Sensibility is constructed around the contrast between two very different characters; but whereas in Pride and Prejudice the tension lies between proud and reserved Mr Darcy and the witty and outspoken Elizabeth Bennett, in Sense and Sensibility the tension is a quieter affair, between two young sisters – Elinor and Marianne Dashwood – who love one another dearly, but who deal very differently both with the experience of heartbreak, and with the upheaval in their lives caused by the recent death of their beloved father.

So when Poet was approached by Pitlochry Festival Theatre director Elizabeth Newman to work on a new stage version of the story, she already knew immediately that her version would focus on two or three powerful themes, to do with love, loss, and the power of romance. Poet is a writer with a rich and varied theatre history. She grew up in Yorkshire, went to the University of St Andrews and then worked as a literary manager at the Bush and Hampstead Theatres in London before returning to Scotland 15 years ago to take up the same role at the new National Theatre of Scotland.

Frances Poet

It wasn’t until the first of her two children was born, in 2010, that she turned her hand to writing plays of her own, including her 2018 Traverse hit Gut, about parents’ fear of stranger danger, and, in 2019, her Stellar Quines/ Citizens’ Theatre show Fibres, about west of Scotland families affected by asbestos-related lung disease. She has also produced many powerful versions of classics texts, including plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Racine and Strindberg; and she approaches Sense and Sensibility well armed with both ideas and experience.

“What happened was interesting,” says Poet, “in that the original approach came before the pandemic – and so much has happened since that time. I lost people close to me during the pandemic, as so many of us did; and re-reading the novel I not only felt much closer to the sensible older sister Elinor – that was happening anyway, as I got older – but also much more aware of Sense and Sensibility as a novel about grief, and how these three women, Elinor and Marianne and their mother, cope with that experience.

“As in all of Austen’s novels, you can’t help but be aware of the politics of the situation; about just how powerless these women are, and how dependent on the whims of men. The essential story of Sense and Sensibility is about how, when the father dies, the whole Dashwood estate is inherited by his only son, the girls’ older brother John.

“John makes a deathbed promise to his father to take care of his mother and sisters; but his scheming wife Fanny persuades him otherwise, and they find themselves unwelcome guests in their own home, with almost no income and nowhere else to go, until a kindly cousin of Mrs Dashwood’s offers them a cottage on his estate in deepest Devon.

“Yet although Jane Austen is a brilliantly sharp and often funny observer of this desperate situation of powerlessness – which she had experienced herself – I think ideas about grief and heartbreak, and how to recover from profound loss, are even more central to Sense and Sensibility. These two young women are utterly heartbroken, first by the loss of their father and the life they have known, and then secondly by the loss of the men they love; their mother is utterly devastated by grief. And I love the way Austen writes about their very different ways of recovering from that experience; about how, despite everything, they find good people who will help them, and also about the possibility of loving again after a failed romance, and the quest for a really enduring life partnership.”

Like all Pitlochry productions, Sense and Sensibility plays in repertoire over the summer with four other main stage shows, and three other productions staged in the theatre’s new Studio, or in its gorgeous outdoor amphitheatre. In the case of Sense and Sensibility, its schedule also includes two short summer runs at the show’s co-producing theatre, the OVO in St Albans, whose home is the Roman amphitheatre thought to be the oldest theatre space in Britain. OVO’s artistic director Adam Nichols will direct the show; and Poet says that she is in awe of the eight actors from this year’s Pitlochry ensemble – led by Kirsty Findlay as Elinor and Lola Aluko as Marianne – who will appear in it, and who have been rehearsing it intermittently since March, alongside all the other shows in the repertoire.

“It is such a different way of working from any other theatre company, and such a fantastic challenge for young actors,” says Poet. “They must honestly feel, by the end of it, that if they can do a season at Pitlochry, they can do anything. It’s truly a wonderful theatre, in such a breathtakingly beautiful place; and I’m delighted to be working there on a story I’ve loved since I was a teenager, and which still – despite everything – speaks to so many of the problems about love, loss, and real human connection, that we face today.

"If Marianne had been alive today, I think she would have been over-sharing on social media, and Elinor would have been trying to talk her out of it; and somehow, across all the years, those two characters still make so much sense to us.”

Sense and Sensibility is in repertoire at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from 21 June until 27 September