Be honest: if you made a list of stage adaptations for which you’d expect to find a notice warning of strobe lighting effects, Jane Austen’s Persuasion wouldn’t be among your top 500 likely candidates. Nor would you expect proceedings to open with a character dancing madly to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” before being interrupted by another declaring, “The music is most disagreeable!”

Most crucially, after reading that much, you wouldn’t expect to be told that this isn’t a gung-ho Regietheater “update” of Austen’s last completed novel (first published posthumously in 1817, although the marketing doesn’t seem to be pushing the bicentennial angle). Director Jeff James’s adaptation (with James Yeatman) takes place, broadly speaking, in modern dress, includes lots of contemporary wackiness and even drops an F-bomb in a society soirée in fashionable Bath, but it is seldom egregious, and on the few occasions when it is, it is self-consciously so and invites us to laugh at the treatment rather than the material. What James does is to distil the events and themes of the novel, removing the tinctures of period so that we can consider them in our own context.

It still makes perfect sense for protagonist Anne Elliot to distance herself from a society seemingly only concerned with who will marry whom, as if that were the end of everything (as it was in Austen’s own early novels). It simply makes more sense for us to see Lara Rossi’s Anne begin as a near-depressive, prone on the floor and separate from the other characters, who she dismisses from the stage by physically pushing them off the double-decker rostrum of Alex Lowde’s set design. (Later the top layer revolves, and the sea at Lyme Regis is portrayed by a thick layer of suds, so that on press night one actor body-surfed into the lap of a surprised front-row punter.)

The examination of the power of persuasion towards making or refusing such couplings is unabated by James’ cheeky treatment, and he gets solid performances out of an ensemble including Geraldine Alexander and Antony Bunsee. The ambivalent conclusion is that, while there is much more to life than love, neither should it be simply dismissed.

Written for the Financial Times.