Written by: Austentatious
Published: Thursday 24th July 2014

Austentatious - aka Amy Cooke-Hodgson, Andy Murray, Cariad Lloyd, Charlotte Gittins, Graham Dickson, Joseph Morpurgo and Rachel Parris - look back to pick their five favourite past performances...

It's scary/amazing to think that we have now done nearly 200 Austentatious shows, all of them entirely improvised and entirely different. We often struggle to remember with any clarity the show we did yesterday, so to be asked to pick 5 from our back catalogue was a seriously taxing challenge. These are by no means our definitive 5 best shows ever - surely only our audience could judge such a thing - but these are a sample 5 that, for one reason or another, stick out and are among some of our personal faves.

Mother's Inheritance (What Yo Mama Gave Ya!)

This was maybe our first favourite show. It came early in our first Edinburgh run, and we seem to recall coming off the stage thinking it was possibly the best show we had done to date. The story was one of gambling and a new card game, bizarrely called "Ponflax" - you don't forget a name like that. What does it even mean?

Amy and Rachel played sisters who were about to come into the titular inheritance. Joe and Graham were a couple of terrible rakes who kept losing money in poor investments and came to prey on the innocent sisters. Paths converged on the local card house presided over by Cariad's sinister and seductive madam. There was an extraordinary, physics-defying card shuffling scene. If memory serves, Andy portrayed a slighted T-Rex*.

Double-0 Darcy

These are the titles we love to get: literature/film/pop culture parodies through an Austen prism, and they invariably include 'Darcy' in the title (see also: "Strictly Come Darcy", "50 Shades of Darcy"). Last year in Edinburgh we finally we got to do James Bond, and it was a lot of fun, as Darcy was recast as a Regency era secret agent. The actual story is a little hazy, as so many of them are, but needless to say many of the Bond tropes were suitably smashed, including gadgets, car(riage) chases and a brilliant wolf-stroking villain in the Blofeld mould. The show contained one of our favourite lines too, in a scene between Andy and Charlotte: "Have you ever lost both your parents in a wolf accident?" "Yes!"

The Maid From Mars

This was an absolute joy of a title to get, and we think one of our very best recent shows. Cariad was the eponymous extra-terrestrial with diamond-hard skin and other special abilities. After being forced to leave the house where she worked by her cruel mistress, the hard-done-by but plucky heroine-alien found herself next at a job centre, inexplicably run by a couple of Swedish idiots - cue jokes about flat-pack furniture and Dime bars - who later reappeared as the town's resident Swedish Detective Agency to solve a crime. We seem to remember the finale involving Cariad melting someone with her laser vision, and the episode also had room to feature a Top 40-esque run down of the town's top bachelors, presented by Dr. Fox.

A Lady's Chocolate Priorities

Who says we don't tackle the big issues? This show saw us take on the evils of addiction. Set in Bath, the Sin City of Austen's day, Rachel played the wholesome protagonist, poised anxiously in the crosshairs of that sugary menace. Cariad and Charlotte were her decent sisters and Joe their insignificant younger brother (he seemed to spend his time in that role sulking by a pot plant). Amy was their maid with a dark secret and Graham returned to Bath, Rachel's erstwhile beau and full-blown chocoholic, to light the fuse to this powder(-ed sugar) keg.

The most memorable scene was a nightmarish, chocolate-withdrawal fever dream which saw the entire cast whirling about the stage tormenting the quivering addict with a (seemingly endless) succession of confectionery brand pun creations - the Travelling Galaxy Minstrels were a personal highlight. In the end, thanks to some good old-fashioned gallantry and Joe's gung-ho dentist, propriety persevered - the message, for once, was clear: kids, don't do choc.

Darcy & Bingley: Forbidden Love

There was no stopping this one. Months of brewing sexual tension between Joe and Graham seemed to have psychically implanted this suggestion in the collective mind of our audience before they duly fed it back to us. Or maybe they just wanted to see two dudes in breeches get it on. A title like this almost arrives on stage fully-formed, and indeed the whoops of excitement when the title was read out were matched moments later when Joe and Graham stepped onto opposing sides of the stage - Cariad and Rachel the respective, hapless wives - and intoned, in exchanged greeting, the first two words of the show: "Darcy." "Bingley." That is one of the great, great feelings in improv: when an audience knows where the show is going at the same time the performers do. From there on out, the show was essentially a Brokeback Mountain parody ("I wish I knew how to quit you, Bingley!" obvs) culminating in a desperately passionate snog that brought the house down. Colin Firth was never hotter...**

* Memory does not serve, this definitely didn't happen. But we wish it did.
** For the record, ladies, Joe and Graham are both straight and extremely available.

'Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel' is at the Pleasance Dome at 1:40pm from 30th July to 25th August (not 12th). Listing