A Salisbury Playhouse Production

Northanger Abbey

by Jane Austen

adapted for the stage by Tim Luscombe

Catherine Morland is hopelessly addicted to Gothic novels that wreak havoc on her imagination. Her quiet, bookish life in rural Hampshire becomes suddenly more exciting when she is taken, as her Aunt’s companion, to enter the leisure society at Bath. There she meets the duplicitous Thorpe siblings – Isabella and John – along with Eleanor Tilney and her brother Henry, a suave and sardonic clergyman with whom she begins to fall in love. An invitation to Henry’s ancestral home, Northanger Abbey, fuels Catherine’s deepening obsessions until her mind is so dominated by fantasy that the edges of fiction and reality begin to blur.

Capturing Austen’s incomparable irony and acerbic comment, Tim Luscombe’s perfectly tuned adaptation will transport you back to a time of high-tea in fashionable Bath and an era when it was perfectly plausible for an Abbey to hold secrets so dangerous and mysterious that they could have been lifted from the very pages of one of Catherine’s beloved novels.

Talkout on Wednesday 14, following 7.30pm performance