Adapting a book for the stage comes down to chucking out all the description that can’t turn into action. Reimagining a 19th-century novel as a three-actor, quick-change performance is another feat altogether, and playwright Zoe Cooper upends theatrical storytelling in her rollicking treatment of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The Shaker Bridge Theatre production captures the dizzy joy of a heroine coming of age with staging that topples theater’s rules.
Cooper’s 2024 play follows Austen’s story with a twist or two. Three actors take on all the essential roles, plunging into a set of trunks for costume changes. In addition to pulling out bonnets and cravats, they narrate just as fiction does. Cooper’s characters are free to announce settings and passage of time, make cutting asides, and burnish everything with an author’s voice. The main character loses herself in sensational novels; why shouldn’t the playwright surround her with narration?
With scenes abbreviated into witty exchanges wrapped in commentary, the performance flies as fast as thought. Bill Coons directs with an emphasis on humor and physicality, which can be one and the same in a show filled with dancing and vigorously bouncing carriage rides. Actors Molly Kate Babos, Carolyn Carter and Michael John Improta have the superb concentration they need to zip themselves in and out of multiple characters tossed on the waves of romance, society and literature.
The script sets up the character switches, but what exhilarates us is watching live performers make these tight turns. From the moment the actors roll a trunk past the bright pink wall of an otherwise empty stage, the production conveys improvised fun. The company’s male player is the one to try on a dress with a pregnancy bump, and gender is up for grabs for everyone.
With scenes abbreviated into witty exchanges wrapped in commentary, the performance flies as fast as thought.
Cooper anchors each actor in one main character, all the names often shortened with chummy familiarity: Catherine is Cath (Babos), Henry is Hen (Improta) and Isabella is Iz (Carter). Carriages are built from trunks and tables, and the scene change into a ballroom is nothing but Cath tugging a stunning chandelier across the ceiling like a beautiful airborne pet on a leash. This show is a game of imagination suspended over a typical love story.
Catherine is ordinary — let-me-count-the-ways ordinary — as narrated glimpses of her country childhood prove. Immersion in gothic stories prepares her only for the life of a heroine, ready for a world of shipwrecks, spooky castles and torment endured. It’s clearly preferable to a dreary future of producing babies for a boring husband.
The usual romantic problems await when she leaves her country home for the high society of Bath and the hope of adventure. Cath is at first a nervous spectator at the balls of the city’s sophisticates. Soon she is noticed by the handsome, melancholy Henry. They dance. The choreography showcases English country dance and cotillion steps, while embodying the starting and stalling of a courtship. Cath is witty and bold; Henry a bit gloomy and oddly savvy about fashion and fabric. Their last dance ends with an argument, just the sort of infuriation that leads to love.
But not before Cath becomes fast friends with Isabella. The two are linked by their love of reading and energized by the sheer relief of being able to say what they think. To maintain their friendship after inevitable marriage, Cath suggests each marry the other’s brother. Sisters-in-law can stay close. Though Iz’s brother is a slack-jawed numbskull whom Cath can’t abide, she nevertheless juggles two suitors.
And here Cooper creates a third choice for Cath, to Austen’s two: embracing the queer potential of female friendship. Iz and Cath love each other. Their declaration is the play’s exuberant high-water mark, with Cath so dazzled she can only say, “I have never read a story like this.”
Babos, as Cath, can hurl herself onto a fainting couch with maximum misery and then rise up to face haughty high society or whatever might haunt an ancient abbey. Behind bangs betraying Cath’s youth, Babos conveys a girl with the courage to squint into a heroine’s future while plainly making it up as she goes along.
Carter gives the free spirit Iz magnetic charm and the scrumptious scorn of an Austen character. She also portrays whole handfuls of auxiliary characters, sometimes in conversation with each other. With passion, wit, and a scarf or hat, she constructs Cath’s world, person by person.
Improta plays numerous women, from Cath’s mother — ever on the brink of giving birth — to the matron who steers Cath into Bath society. As Hen, Improta radiates a brooding dignity; as Iz’s brother, he’s less stimulated by Cath than by a doltish lust for speed when driving a carriage with her in it.
The final section of the play follows the novel’s parody so faithfully that it gets tangled in the excesses Austen was ridiculing. Iz disappears, deflating the most enchanting relationship in the play. When Cath finally reaches Hen’s real and leaky abbey, she finds a fortune-hunting father instead of fiends. After the fizziness of so many characters leaping between scene and narration, the play flattens to labored exposition, suddenly hard to follow. There’s life in it, but it wheezes to its happy ending.
The unsatisfying conclusion doesn’t diminish the overall jauntiness of the theatrical experience. Cath sets out to live in what novels have shown her, what she calls “the world as it ought to be.” The virtuoso performances and invigorating freshness of Northanger Abbey take viewers to another world that very much ought to be. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Novelty Act | Theater review: Northanger Abbey, Shaker Bridge Theatre”
This article appears in October 14 • 2026.
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