Jane Austen (sort of) will be a total blast in delicious night on Eastbourne stage​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

At last, after all these years, it’s Jane Austen exactly as Jane Austen should have written it. This is an Austen where the ghastly Collins gets told to eff off; where a decidedly coarse Mrs B will happily announce she’s off for a p*ss; where Waggon Wheels are dished out, plated at the ball; and where Scotch eggs have the most awful gastro-intestinal repercussions.

Jane Austen at school was every schoolboy’s nightmare; every page felt like it came with the full weight of a month of football-less Sundays; this now is every schoolboy’s dream – precisely the kind of thing, at the age of 14, you’d have wanted to happen to Austen if only you’d had the wit to imagine it. And yet, and this is the brilliant thing, it is actually delivered with love and the (funniest kind of) respect for Austen. The tale is told faithfully; the characters come to life (albeit heightened); and it weighs into all the issues that Austen herself actually weighed into.

It’s just that it is delivered with fabulous cheekiness, total licence and sheer comic brilliance. The premise is that five domestic servants from back in the day re-enact the tale of Pride & Prejudice. They do it outrageously, uproariously and completely superbly in the best show we’ve seen all winter at the CFT.

The five women in the cast – Ruth Brotherton, Lucy Gray, Dannie Harris, Leah Jamieson and Megan Louise Wilson (read interview here) – conjure it all, their timing, their expressions, their absolutely everything perfect. Those of us who have never quite lost our inner schoolboy will see it as revenge; those who love their Austen will surely see it as proof that Jane is so wonderful she can withstand just about any kind of retelling. Here we get – among a range of beautifully delivered pop songs – Liz delivering You’re So Vain to Darcy, a moment topped only by Jane sitting there munching Frosties by the handful straight out of the packet. Delicious too is Liz’s response when it is suggested that Collins might not like bad language.

But the thing that is going to have me sniggering for most of the night… well, it is those Waggon Wheels. This is a show shot through with the most sublime comic touches from first to last. A total blast.