Two Bit Classic’s version of Pride and Prejudice was billed as ‘inventive’. It featured, we were informed, only two actors for all twenty-one roles. It sounded like something Mr Bennet would not have liked. In solidarity, I was very much looking forward to not liking it either. It is a truth universally acknowledged, I thought to myself smugly, that an experimental production of an Austen novel must be a disaster waiting to happen. I found my seat and examined the set. It was minimalist, sketchy and impressionistic – there was something resembling a Regency window hanging at a drunken angle in mid-air, and bits of furnishing were haphazardly scattered around what had probably once been a perfectly nice rug. I emitted a deep, Mr Bennet-like sigh, and felt that I was likely to be confirmed in all my prejudices.

Unexpectedly it was marvellous. Writer Joannah Tincey (who is also one half of the dramatis personae) and director Abigail Anderson have noticed the fact that Austen’s narrative is chiefly composed of ‘close-ups’ rather than ‘wide-shot’ angles of observation, which permit the reader – here, the audience – intimate impressions of individual characters’ perspectives. Anderson’s production is a blend of narration and dramatisation, which allows her to be faithful to the clever subtleties of free indirect discourse, whilst leaving out none of the straight-up wit of the dialogues. In practice, this means that the two actors sometimes address the audience and sometimes address each other, and sometimes they throw in a smart sidelong wink for those who know Pride and Prejudice better than they know themselves and revel in the meta-theatrical pleasure of the whole thing.

I was doing a lot of that revelling, because the complex operation of distilling Austen’s narration into a two-handed presentation was managed with a lightness of touch that experimental theatre is prone to miss: the way the story went was inevitable, but how it got there was not, and there were all sorts of surprises and flourishes along the way. Tincey was a sprightly and sparky Lizzie, and Nick Underwood, the other half of the company, was moody and taciturn as Darcy; but in many ways Lizzie and Darcy were not the stars of the evening, and Anderson’s production was all the better for intelligently bringing out the theatrical potential of the lesser characters. The main romance narrative was fairly outshone by some superb cross-dressing in the Jane and Bingley plot (logistically, Jane’s many conversations with Lizzie required that she be played by Underwood; likewise Bingley, in conversation with Darcy, had to be played by Tincey). Underwood’s Jane in particular was just the right side of prim, campily played and absurdly sweet, in fine contrast to Tincey’s sophisticated, fan-toting Caroline Bingley. The minor characters, carefully denoted by props or verbal tics, provided reliable comic relief. Underwood’s Mr Collins took up a disproportionate amount of stage time and deserved all of it, paying court to an amusingly double-gendered Lady Catherine De Bourgh with obsequious and oleaginous precision. Tincey moved easily from the pathetically plain Charlotte Lucas (all wire glasses, awkward hunched stance and heavy self-deprecation) to the whiny teenage enthusiasm of Lydia. Underwood’s Kitty deserves a special mention for her leitmotif of a hacking cough (‘I do not cough for my own amusement’), which plays particularly well when Mrs Forster invites the girls down to Brighton for sea-bathing: ‘It would do me a great deal of good’, Kitty says, and coughs heavily in a way that makes us feel it would be more likely to do her a great deal of harm.

There are problems with the comic emphasis, of course: Jane and Bingley’s romance is too camped up to be properly delightful, and Underwood’s amusingly sullen Darcy at Longbourn and Netherfield (‘Mr Darcy said very little’) makes somewhat too rapid an evolution into the accommodating and romantically available master of Pemberley. By and large, though, with the exception of a few fumbled lines that may be put down to the Herculean task of learning approximately half of Pride and Prejudice by heart, the production is captivating and charming. It’s also intelligent: Anderson’s limited set and even more limited range of actors have a lot to say about the claustrophobia of a parochial Regency society, the small number of social moves that are permissible and the larger number of moves that are not, and the resultant panicky drive to ensnare novel young gentlemen who arrive in the neighbourhood with ten thousand pounds a year. Mr Bennet, I reckon, would have come round in the end.