‘You must always be the lowest and the last,” snaps shrew-like Mrs Norris at Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Fanny has been taken from her own, impoverished household and installed at Mansfield Park, home of her rich uncle Sir Thomas Bertram. As Lady Bertram is never seen, being always confined to her bedroom with a headache, Mrs Norris, her older sister, rules the roost.

At a time when every period drama is judged by the huge production values of Downton Abbey, it’s a particularly tall order to put Austen’s most controversial novel on the stage. The book contains more than 20 characters, and this new Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds production retains 16 of them, played by just eight actors. Much depends, therefore, on the script, and here Bury St Eds has found a winner — Tim Luscombe’s adaptation packs all the vital elements of the novel into a two and a half hour running time with admirable clarity.

Fanny is the pivotal character, and quite properly Ffion Jolly, playing her, doesn’t have to double up as anyone else. In the first half of the play, with Fanny very definitely squashed by Mrs Norris (Karen Ascoe, splendidly officious) into being seen and not heard, Jolly signals Fanny’s reactions by using telling facial expressions. Then, as Fanny emerges from her silent chrysalis, Jolly makes it clear that she is an attractive, intelligent woman. This is a star performance.

Meanwhile some memorable characters develop elsewhere. Kristin Atherton and Samuel Collings are an excellent double act as brother and sister Mary and Henry Crawford — both are capricious guests at Mansfield Park, and don’t always care whose feelings they hurt as they pursue their own ends. There’s a hilarious cameo from Geoff Arnold as the vague but rich Mr Rushworth, who becomes briefly entangled with Sir Thomas’s elder daughter (Leonie Spilsbury, a former pupil of Oxford School of Drama), while Richard Heap makes it plain the Sir Thomas himself may be stern, but is willing to change his opinions when proved wrong.

Colin Blumenau’s direction moves events along at a cracking pace, so the cast has to deliver the script with both speed and clarity. This it does, with the exception of one actor who sometimes mutters the end of his sentences. By the end, when Edmund Bertram (Pete Ashmore) bashfully proposes to Fanny, you cannot fail to be seduced by this captivating production.

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