It is something of a truism – you might even say a truth universally acknowledged – that Jane Austen’s novels have proved unusually adaptable into new genres and for new times. Sense and Sensibility has not only become an Oscar-winning film (and films in India and Mexico), but also TV shows, web series, games, and a comedy/science fiction novel called Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Adaptations of Austen’s novels for the theatre though, are sparser than we might expect, given the apparent malleability and the enormous cultural currency of Austen’s stories elsewhere. Jessica Swale’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, first premiered in 2014 and now performed by the Oxford Theatre Guild, demonstrates some of the difficulties and possibilities involved in transferring such a distinctively ‘novelistic’ novel onto the stage.

Perhaps most interesting to Criticks readers is this genre-shift’s effect of drawing out Austen’s eighteenth-century theatrical and satirical influences. It’s no surprise that Swale’s directing credits include productions of The Belle’s Stratagem, The School for Scandal and The Rivals: her adaptation feels at times as though Richard Brinsley Sheridan or Hannah Cowley had somehow got hold of an Austen novel. The action moves from various rural settings to fashionable society in London, and back again; and in both, we are introduced to various stock ‘types’, with their distinctive quirks or traits. Even Margaret is given an obsession with natural history, creating a topical and sympathetic echo of the self-taught learned ladies satirised in stage comedies since the Restoration. And if several of Swale’s versions of Austen’s other secondary characters – Fanny Dashwood, Mrs Jennings, the Palmers, all played about three times larger than life by the Oxford Theatre Guild’s cast – occasionally seem to have wandered in, gossiping and gesticulating, from Evelina or She Stoops to Conquer, these texts were, after all, where Austen got them from in the first place. The result is that the novel’s place within a long satirical tradition, often overlooked, is emphasised and the audience is never left without a laugh for long.

On the other hand, of course, Sense and Sensibility is famous precisely for its departures from this tradition; and especially for the free indirect speech with which Austen weaves together her comedy with the impression of psychological depth and complexity. Without this, the stage adaptation – like any stage adaptation – necessarily loses much of what makes Sense and Sensibility a great novel. It is an intricate challenge to maintain the audience’s engagement in the subtle and simultaneously developing stories of Elinor and Marianne, and while Hannah Brooks (Elinor) and Kate O’Connor (Marianne) worked hard in these roles to enlist our sympathies, the slightly exaggerated antics of the comic relief threatened at times to overshadow their portrayal of more nuanced personalities and emotions. Their performances give us a sense of the close relationship between the sisters – but the nuances of their inner lives, particularly that of the introverted Elinor, inevitably became somewhat obscured by the transition from page to stage.

All this might be balanced out were Swale more often willing to reshape the text and create something more boldly theatrical. We do get to see Colonel Brandon and Willoughby duelling, which is fun and dramatically effective, but the long back story of the two Elizas is told at second-hand, just as in the book, by Brandon explaining it to Elinor. This is not Austen’s most engaging section – as Marianne might complain: what is Eliza to us? who knows, or who cares, for her? – but while the novel’s inset narrative might help to absorb the reader in her story, in the theatre, it is difficult to forget that you are watching the two least demonstrative characters having a quiet conversation on a sofa, about two women who never appear on stage. Still more tricky are the re-tellings, from new points of view, of scenes we have already watched. In the novel, for example, we see Marianne’s breakdown at the ball largely from Elinor’s point of view, before piecing together a more complete scene from the narratives offered by others, including her antagonist Willoughby. Though the theatre might seem to offer the potential means of immersing the audience in these multiple perspectives and discoveries, Swale opts to stage the scene once, and follow it with a rather static monologue in which Willoughby describes how it made him feel.

Ultimately, perhaps, this production aims to capture Austen’s ability to entertain, rather than to experiment with new interpretations or forms of storytelling. In a comfortable conclusion, again reminiscent of an eighteenth-century comedy, everyone learns something about the relative importance of “the head and the heart” and all the couples abruptly wed in a shower of confetti. Both play and production manage to walk a delicate line between evoking Georgian elegance, and tipping over into the clichés of the Austen industry: this final wedding scene, and a choreographed ball, edge, undeniably, towards the second, more theme-park view, but the story is sensitively enough told, and has enough heart, to keep it from feeling like a pastiche. I hope it doesn’t sound patronising to say that all this produces an entirely enjoyable evening to please dedicated and casual ‘Janeites’. But the radically theatrical adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, the adaptation that, like Polly Teale’s or the Bristol Old Vic’s versions of Jane Eyre, challenges us to look in new ways at a beloved book – with or without sea monsters – is yet to come.

Sense and Sensibility, performed by the Oxford Theatre Guild, is at the Oxford Playhouse until the 12th of March 2016.