Part 1: Pride and Prejudice on stage: 1895 – 1936
Performing Jane Austen’s novels on stage began around 50 years after her death. In the 1860s, amateur male actors delivered an adapted monologue by Emma’s Miss Bates in local variety shows, apparently to big, gender-bending laughs. By the end of the 19th century however, it was Pride and Prejudice that emerged as Austen’s go-to novel for dramatisation.
In the early 20th century, adaptations of P&P gathered pace, until a slew of them appeared in the 1930s. In 1940, MGM’s film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier credited a play as its inspiration and cemented the novel as hot property on screen and stage – as it still is today.
Timeline of stage adaptations:
1895 – Rosina Filippi published a collection of short Austen-inspired scenes for drawing room performance of the kind in which Jane Austen herself took part.
1897 – The first known performances of P&P plays were mounted by all-female casts at women’s colleges: Royal Holloway in the UK (1897) and Wellesley College in the US (1899).
1901 – Filippi’s The Bennets: A Play without a Plot was performed as an afternoon matinee at the Royal Court Theatre in London – the first known professional stage adaptation of Austen’s fiction. Winifred Mayo, the co-director who also played Elizabeth, was a noted women’s suffrage activist. Reviews were mixed, and the script was never published.
1906 – American Marion Morse Mackaye’s Pride and Prejudice: A Play was published and became a staple of school performance. This adaptation featured only three Bennet sisters, cutting Mary and Kitty.
1917 – Ideal Pictures advertised a Pride and Prejudice silent film in the UK. It was given the tagline “A sweetly simple tale of a mother’s hunt for daughters’ husbands” but was never released.
1922 – A single performance of Pride & Prejudice: A Play in Four Acts by Eileen and J. C. Squires took place at the Palace Theatre in London, as a fundraiser for Bedford College for Women. The cast featured real-life, middle-aged husband and wife actors in humorous pairings. Offstage, its Elizabeth Bennet (age 44) was married to its Mr. Collins, and its Darcy (age 57) was married to its Mrs. Bennet.
1926 – Elizabeth Refuses by socialist feminist playwright Margaret Macnamara. At only 25 minutes long, this ‘miniature comedy’ focused on the confrontation between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth.
1930 – Pride and Prejudice: A Play in Four Acts – this faithful adaptation by Anne Johnson-Jones drew dialogue directly from Jane Austen’s novel, although it made dramatic cuts to both plot and characters, such as removing Lady Catherine de Bourgh and including very little of Darcy.
1935 – Pride and Prejudice: A Sentimental Comedy in Three Acts by Helen Jerome opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in November 1935 and ran for 219 performances, before transferring to the St James’s Theatre in London. This hit production served as the basis for MGM’s 1940 film Pride and Prejudice and introduced the world to the first sexy Mr Darcy.
1936 – I Have Five Daughters: A Morning-Room Comedy in Three Acts – another highly inventive adaptation by Margaret Macnamara.
1936 – A.A. Milne’s ill-timed play Miss Elizabeth Bennet was completed just as Jerome’s appeared in London. While the play preserves the central romance, it is known for Milne’s emphasis on dialogue and humour, often giving Mr. Bennet the best lines and adapting the story to a male perspective.