Northanger Abbey

11:07am Wednesday 15th August 2007

September 6-29, Salisbury Playhouse.

The new season at Salisbury Playhouse opens with Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, in a new adaptation by Tim Luscombe before embarking on a national tour.

Catherine Morland is hopelessly addicted to macabre romance novels that wreak havoc on her imagination. When she leaves her quiet, bookish, country life in Hampshire to be taken, as a companion, to enter the leisure society at Bath, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her.

Here she meets the duplicitous Thorpe siblings, Isabella and John, together with Eleanor Tilney and her brother Henry, the suave and sardonic clergyman with whom she begins to fall in love.

An invitation from the wealthy but avaricious General Tilney to Henry's ancestral home, Northanger Abbey, fuels Catherine's deepening obsession with the gothic. Intensified by her assiduous reading, Catherine's suspicions about the terrifying General Tilney and hidden secrets at Northanger Abbey grow, 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 evokes 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 they could have been lifted from the pages of one of Catherine's beloved novels.

Catherine Morland is played by Jennie Maitland, Henry Tilney is played by Gregory Finnegan, Isabella Thorpe is played by Emma Hamilton and Eleanor Tilney by Helen Bradbury. James Morland is played by Ben Righton. The cast is completed by Christine Cox as Mrs Allen, Dominic Gerrard as John Thorpe and Terry Taplin as General Tilney.