“Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey” Finds Gothic Mischief in the Greek Theatre – front mezz junkies, Theater News

Frontmezzjunkies reports: Guild Festival Theatre sends Catherine Morland racing through romance, imagination, and comic chaos at Guild Park

By Ross

I knew I was in for a delightfully Austen-esque joy ride before I even reached the Greek Theatre in
Scarborough, where the Guild Festival Theatre’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey was about to unwrap itself. And thanks to Theatre in Transit: Navigating to Northanger, a wonderfully wise addition to the production, a shuttle bus from the TTC station became its own little piece of theatrical foreplay, or, as our very energetic “Lady” Guild guide called it, our “carriage.” Dressed for the occasion and determined to prepare us for the great ball that lies ahead, my chaperone spent the ride teaching us the rules of love, marriage, fashion, small talk, and social status as we wound our way toward the beautiful Guild Park & Gardens. Under her tutelage, we were introduced to the three pillars of romance, the ideals of status-building, and even given the opportunity to have our chaperone broker a match if anyone happened to catch our eye. By the time our “carriage” arrived, we had already been initiated into a world of prescribed behaviour and elaborate romantic calculations, creating a delicious setup for our introduction to Catherine Morland, our heroine who is about to charge straight through those rules with the unstoppable imagination of a young woman who has spent far too much time reading Gothic romance novels.

By the time we take our seats, the atmosphere is already established, and the production wastes no time in taking advantage of its extraordinary outdoor setting. The historic Greek Theatre, with its stone structure, columns and open-air setting, becomes the world through which Catherine’s imagination is given full access to run wild. There is no traditional curtain to rise. Instead, Shawn Piccione’s sound design begins the theatrical seduction with old-fashioned, Austen-esque versions of modern love songs, including the familiar rhythms and rhymes of a material girl living in a material world. It is a clever little tease before Catherine herself takes us by the gloved hand and begins the story. “Does it not make your heart race hearing those words?” she asks with all the earnestness of an Austen heroine, and suddenly the evening has its guide. Georgia Findlay’s Catherine is immediately captivating, a book-loving romantic who wants desperately to become part of the kind of heart-pounding story she has spent so much time reading, and we join her, quite happily at her side.

Findlay’s Catherine is wonderfully suited to a story in which imagination can become both a source of joy and a dangerous trap. She embellishes every encounter with the language and ideals of the romances filling her head, looking at the world around her through the heightened expectations of someone who wants life to deliver the kind of melodrama she has found in books. She is not poor enough to be tragic, but she is not rich enough to move freely through the world she imagines. When she begins her story with the direct address, “Now dear readers,” the production immediately establishes its playful relationship with the audience. Much like the narrator of “Bridgerton,” we are not simply watching Catherine stumble into love, mystery, and social danger. We are being ushered alongside her, invited into the machinery of her imagination as she attempts to turn prescribed social niceties into the ingredients of her own romantic and spine-tingling adventure.

Tyler J. Seguin’s adaptation and direction beautifully give this production permission to be gloriously broad. Rotating around Findlay, the three actors, Isaiah Kolundzic, Andrew Prashad and Kiana Woo, take on more than 20 characters between them, creating an entire social world through quick costume changes, physical gestures, shifting voices, and sudden changes in attitude. The resulting parade of siblings, parents, friends, gossips, and assorted figures from Catherine’s world moves at a manic pace, sometimes making it genuinely difficult to keep track of who is who, which gentleman belongs to which family, and exactly where our loyalties are supposed to land. That confusion becomes part of the fun, and Seguin cleverly acknowledges it when he stops the action to spin us through the revolving cast of characters, giving us a chance to orient ourselves once again.

Kolundzic, Prashad and Woo throw themselves completely into those shape-shifting demands, and their commitment keeps the social world moving around Findlay’s Catherine at an almost ridiculous speed. Their versatility is central to the production’s comic rhythm, as characters become instantly larger than life through the smallest physical or vocal adjustment, reinforcing the sense that we are seeing the world through Catherine’s heightened imagination and are invited to play along. Alex Amini’s costumes are crucial to that game, establishing characters with quick visual cues before gleefully transforming them again as the actors race from one role to another.

The result is a social world that feels deliberately unstable, and that theatrical instability is exactly where Seguin’s comic strategy finds its rhythm. The broad gestures, ridiculous additions and relentless pace create the appearance of chaos, but the production is carefully controlled beneath it all. There is a wonderfully Monty Python-like willingness to keep pushing the joke until it becomes gloriously ridiculous, yet the production remains carefully controlled beneath all that apparent chaos. Seguin knows that the audience needs to be able to follow the madness, and the physical comedy gives us just enough visual information to keep Catherine’s rapidly shifting world in focus.

The Greek Theatre itself becomes an essential part of that machinery. Elisia Evans’ production design wisely leaves the towering stone structure and open-air environment exposed, allowing the architecture to become the foundation for Catherine’s Gothic imagination rather than covering it with an entirely new world. The surrounding statues and rescued architectural fragments gathered throughout Guild Park add to the feeling that this story has been transplanted into another time and place, finding new life among the stones. Honey Hoseiny’s lighting works with the natural darkness as evening falls, giving that same environment the flexibility to move with Catherine from romantic fantasy into social comedy and Gothic possibility. The park, the stone and the changing light become part of the production’s theatrical language, giving the whole mad adventure somewhere wonderfully tangible to unfold.

Yet, somewhere in the madness of it all, the sheer speed of this production can occasionally work against its emotional centre. There are so many jokes, transformations, costume additions and comic setups arriving in quick succession that, just occasionally, the weight of all those layers begins to overwhelm the quieter story underneath. Luckily, Catherine’s heart remains remarkably present because Findlay never loses sight of it. Beneath the romantic fantasies, the Gothic embellishments and the frantic social machinery is a young woman trying to understand love, friendship, and the difference between the stories she has read and the life she is actually living. Findlay holds firmly onto that emotional thread even when the production is running circles all around her.

That is also where Catherine’s fascination with becoming the Nancy Drew of an Austen melodrama becomes so much fun. She wants mysteries where there may only be misunderstandings and grief. She wants danger where there may simply be the complicated behaviour of other people. Her imagination turns ordinary encounters into clues, suspicious glances into evidence, and the Gothic world of her favourite novels into something she can almost step inside. The production finds the comedy in that impulse without treating Catherine’s romantic heart as something foolish. We fully believe in her desire for romance and mystery as part of what makes her so engaging, and it gives the evening its emotional pulse even when everything around her threatens to fly completely off the rails.

Seguin’s Northanger Abbey, presented by Guild Festival Theatre, is a fast-paced, exuberant theatrical romp that knows exactly how much fun it can have with Austen’s fascination with romance, social behaviour and runaway imagination. But its real pleasure comes from the young woman at the centre of all that glorious chaos. Catherine wants to believe in romance, mystery and the possibility that life might unfold with the same thrilling intensity as the stories she reads. She also has to discover that the world around her cannot always behave like a Gothic novel, and that the people she loves cannot always fit neatly into the roles her imagination assigns them. Nor would she ultimately want them to. Her imagination is not something that needs to be extinguished. It is something she needs to learn how to carry, even when reality refuses to follow the script.

That feels like the heart of Findlay’s performance, and perhaps the reason all those hats, costumes, characters, jokes, transformations and Gothic flourishes ultimately land. Catherine’s whirlwind is allowed to be enormous because her heart remains so recognizable beneath it. As the evening finally moves toward its happy ending and our “carriage” waits to carry us back through the modern world, I found myself thinking about that young romantic heart still racing beneath all the theatrical machinery. She has not stopped dreaming. She has simply begun to understand that stepping into a story means discovering what happens when the world writes a few lines of its own.