BBC Jane Austen drama won't have posh accents, makers say

Telegraph

6 days ago

The BBC's new Jane Austen drama will not feature 'fetishised' posh accents, its makers have said.
The corporation is adapting The Other Bennet Sister, a work of fiction by Janice Hadlow which imagines a happier ending for Mary Bennet, Elizabeth's overlooked sibling in Pride and Prejudice.
Producer Jane Tranter, who said she had noted Austen's popularity with young people on TikTok, told an audience at the Hay Festival: 'The other thing with period costumes is, you start speaking posh, and not everybody spoke posh in those days. You have to work with that as well. So sometimes it's about a loosening around the fetishisation of a period.'
Traditionally, dramas set in Austen's world also feature women in bonnets and the curled hairstyles of the era. The Other Bennet Sister will not because viewers could find such details weird, Tranter added.
'I always say to costume and hair and make-up and production design: you have to know what the rules are and then we look to see where we break them in order to build a bridge and offer a proper, welcoming hand to a modern audience.'
Being a stickler for period details in costume and hair can alienate viewers and make the actors feel constrained, Tranter explained.
'A fetishised approach'
'If you do a complete like-for-like, matchy-matchy, here are the exact buttons, here are the exact knickers beneath the dress, that becomes such a fetishised approach that it becomes a barrier in between the audience and what's going on.
'It means the actors are so enclosed in these costumes they are wearing that it becomes a costume, rather than what their characters are wearing to eat breakfast that morning.
'We [will] dress the hair slightly differently because if you dress the hair exactly like it is in all those oil paintings, or put the hats on, actually an audience will not be able to take their eyes off these strange curls or weird-y hats.'
Elsewhere, Tranter said she wanted to hire movement coaches to stop extras moving too slowly in their costumes in the background.
She added. 'One of the things I'm always very keen on when doing a period drama is getting a movement coach in, because one of the things that tends to happen is how slowly all the extras walk in period dramas.
'We will have a movement coach in to get the Bennet family to move like a family. You can try and get a sense of authenticity and emotional relationships, and try to get the actors to think past the fact they're in period costume.'
Tranter is the co-founder of Bad Wolf, the production company behind Doctor Who, Industry and the BBC's adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Work begins on the Austen drama next week and it will air on the BBC next year. It will star Ella Bruccoleri, best known for her role as Sister Frances in Call the Midwife, as Mary.
Hadlow, who was controller of BBC Two before leaving the corporation to become a full-time author, said the story would be full of authentic period detail – suggesting that previous period dramas featuring mannered ballroom scenes were historically inaccurate.
'These things are often too sedate,' Hadlow said. 'They were a moment to let off steam, with a sense of release and excitement and everybody piling in and having a really good time.'
Hadlow said she wrote the book because she felt that Mary had been unfairly maligned as 'the ugly sister in a family of swans, always somehow outside the family circle'.
The first part of The Other Bennet Sister retells the Pride and Prejudice story from Mary's point of view, while the second part follows Mary to London and the Lake District.