Period piece with mixof comedy and drama

Helen, who grew up in Southwater and went to school at Millais in Horsham, brings the show to the Mill Studio at Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre on November 5-6 and The Hawth, Crawley on November 15.

In the piece, breakfast becomes far more complicated than it should be when Emma Bovary lets the conversation unravel to expose her hidden, debt-ridden, unfaithful past to a blissfully-unaware husband.

Fay Weldon imagines a new episode in Flaubert’s classic story of debt, passion and bourgeois ambition in 19th-century rural France. Emma’s memories are magically conjured as passionate loves appear unexpectedly from cupboards…

“Fay developed a play based on Madame Bovary quite a long time ago now,” says Helen. “It has been produced before, but we then discovered the play last year and put on a production in London. Fay came along to see it quite a few times and absolutely loved it.

“I love costume and period drama, and I also love the mix of comedy and tragedy that you get with this. All the characters are really well drawn. They are very realistic, and Fay has really captured Flaubert’s sense of the frailty and the irony of the human condition. The characters are very real - and there is humour and sadness and frailty.

“It’s based on Madame Bovary but in a slightly-different set-up. She creates a scene between Emma and her husband where Emma confesses all - a conversation that does not happen in the book. The play is a fantastic exploration of their relationship.

“Certainly Flaubert was sympathetic to the position of women in society at the time. Certainly there was no chance for a woman without independent means to move on and have a career.

“The novel created a lot of controversy. Emma was judged very harshly and she has this awful death as punishment for her behaviour. But Flaubert has sympathy for her human frailty and that is reflected in the play.”