Alexandra Jorgensen’s 45-minute one-woman show Tales of a Jane Austen Spinster is outstanding and kick-starts Fringe season with superb fanfare. Written and performed by Jorgensen alone, it is a triumph for solo theatre, proving just how delightful, moving and hysterically funny it can be.
Bizarrely, the production opens rather in the spirit of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: it transpires that while the audience has been waiting in their seats, Jorgensen – aka Lilliana Bentley, our heroine – has been hidden on set the whole time, and as the lights dim, she emerges from under a furniture cover with an almost zombie-like eeriness. Of course, no such zombie is present: what we are witnessing, so we are later told, is the birth of Lilliana from the pages of a manuscript that Jane Austen supposedly left unfinished before her death.
And so we meet our Jane Austen Spinster: 27-year-old Lilliana, who is not best pleased with her story being left unfinished and has materialised in the modern world to find Austen and make her finish it. Upon discovering that the author is no longer around, she embarks upon the modern dating world – with hilarious, and slightly dire, consequences.
One-woman shows rely entirely on their leading lady, and this one rises to the challenge with no problem. Jorgensen is a phenomenal performer: charismatic, bubbly, and capable of eliciting laughs from her audience at the drop of a hat. Her Austen heroine is clumsy, naïve, and (understandably) horrified at the ways of the modern world. She has had no luck finding a man in her fictional realm and blows an exasperated raspberry when she hears that Jane Austen is remembered for her “heroines who find love”. She manages to download a dating app to find the romantic hero Austen never gave her – she excitedly announces her first match, ‘Dylan’ – and is met with unsolicited penis selfies (“do they really look like that? How unfortunate,” she ventures), and suggestive emoticon messages featuring peaches and aubergines (“this man seems interested in farming…am I missing something?”).
The script also provides provocative – and perhaps accurate – comments on our own time. “Has the art of conversation completely died?” she cries at the height of her dating-app frustration. It was unclear if Jorgensen had expected the audience to erupt into a chorus of “yes!” – but she handled it like a professional. The social critique eventually transitions to focus on society’s expectations of women and how things have (and haven’t) progressed since Austen’s era. One particularly striking observation is that, while women were used as commodities back then, they were traded for solid economic goods like chicken or oxen, whereas now men use them for cheap alcohol, one-night stands and buffalo wings.
Additionally, unfinished stories, a clear theme in the plot, evolve into a symbolically touching and inspiring message in the play’s finale: all of our stories are unfinished, like Lilliana’s, and regardless of what society throws at us, the best we can do is take authorship and write our own next chapters, without fear or self-censorship. Thus does this short and sweet Fringe show charmingly conclude, guaranteeing that you will leave the theatre with a goofy grin (As well as envy at how talented Jorgensen was to come up with all this herself).
Tales of a Jane Austen Spinster runs from 4-12 August at Fern Studios, Greenside, Nicholson Square. Tickets are available here.
Image via Instagram with the permission of Alexandra Jorgensen