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Persuasion (adapted from Jane Austen by Tim Luscombe)

Tim Luscombe

Genre: Drama

Cast size: 10

Duration: 100 mins approx

Tim Luscombe | Drama | Full-length | 4m, 6f doubling or larger cast

Short synopsis

Persuasion is Tim Luscombe's stage adaptation of Jane Austen's final novel. The play follows Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth as they reconnect years after being separated. With Wentworth's naval success and improved circumstances, a second chance at love becomes possible. This spirited adaptation captures Austen's wit and social commentary, featuring beloved characters navigating themes of constancy, rank, and romance amid the Napoleonic era's social upheaval.

  • Synopsis
  • Characters
  • Reviews

'Period drama at its best'. 

At 18, Anne Elliot was persuaded to part from her beloved Captain Frederick Wentworth. Now, at 27, she believes her destiny is to live off the memories of the few short months of happiness they experienced together. But, as the Napoleonic Wars are ending and the Navy returns to land, everything that was considered unsuitable about Captain Frederick has proved unimportant. His intemperance and recklessness have won him promotion at sea, and the prizes he's seized for himself off the Indies have rendered his lack of ancestry incidental. He's come back to marry. Will Anne get a second chance?

This stage version is faithfully, but not slavishly, adapted from Jane Austen’s last novel and great satiric masterpiece, Persuasion. It honours Austen’s biting wit, astonishing insights and inspiring dialogue, and, in a spirited, fast-paced narrative, relishes all the most cherished characters of the novel; from vain, snobbish Sir Walter, and the hypochondriac Mary, to the brutal, scheming Mr Elliot and the home-loving Crofts. The play, as the novel, with its concerns for all matters martial and marital, lets lose an indirect and ironic attack on love, youth, rank and power, while celebrating romantic constancy in an age of turbulent social change. 

4m, 6f or a larger cast of 23 (11m, 12f +ensemble)
Persuasion can be performed by 10 actors multi-rolling or it can have a much larger cast

  • Anne Elliot (f)
  • Mary Musgrove / Mrs Smith (f)
  • Elizabeth Elliot / Mrs Harville / Jemima / The Crofts’ Maid (f)
  • Louisa Musgrove / Lady Dalrymple / Mr Taylor (f)
  • Mrs Clay / Mrs Croft (f)
  • Lady Russell (f)
  • Sir Walter Elliot / Mr Maitland (voice only) (m)
  • Frederick Wentworth (m)
  • Charles Musgrove / Mr William Elliot / Mr Benwick (m)
  • Admiral Croft / Mr Harville / Butler / Singer (m)

The People of Bath etc are played by members of the Company

A Full List of the Characters

  • Sir Walter Elliot - a landowning baronet of Somersetshire
  • Elizabeth Elliot - his eldest daughter, unmarried
  • Anne Elliot - his second daughter, unmarried
  • Mary Musgrove - his youngest daughter, married to Charles
  • Charles Musgrove - married to Mary
  • Louisa Musgrove - Charles’ unmarried sister
  • Lady Russell - neighbour of Sir Walter, widowed
  • Frederick Wentworth - a naval commodore, unmarried
  • Mr William Elliot - Sir Walter’s heir and cousin, widowed
  • Admiral Croft - Sir Walter’s tenant
  • Mrs Croft - his wife
  • Mrs Clay - a widowed friend of Elizabeth Elliot
  • Mr Harville - a naval captain
  • Mrs Harville - his wife
  • Mr Benwick - a naval officer, unmarried
  • Mrs Smith - an old school friend of Anne’s, widowed
  • Lady Dalrymple - a high-ranking relative of the Elliot’s, widowed
  • Jemima - Mary’s Maid
  • The Crofts’ Maid
  • Sir Walter’s Butler
  • Two Sailors - Mr Maitland [voice only] and Mr Taylor - a singer
  • The People of Bath

Reviews from The Salisbury Playhouse Production
With the arrival of Tim Luscombe's version of Persuasion, written for Salisbury Playhouse, it would seem that Austen fans have found their champion. Luscombe invents crisp dialogue and flashbacks to express
Anne’s inner life. He does the novel’s jokes credit, and adds a couple of
priceless ones of his own. It is very Austen: handsome, literate, eloquent…. [Libby Purvis, The (London) Times]

Following the success of Luscombe's rendering of Northanger Abbey, also for Salisbury, his new adaptation of Austen's last work is both colourful and touching.

Luscombe's intelligent doubling gives us more then twenty characters from ten players - a fairly good return in terms of artistic productivity in an age of economy.

Tim Luscombe’s adaptation for the Playhouse, with a downsized cast of characters, is a beautifully romantic and gripping play.

Anyone who has ever enjoyed a Jane Austen book will love this charming play.

Squarely designed to meet the stark realities of our economic climate, with a cast of just ten players, yet skilfully maintains the sumptuous and elegant feel of the era in which the action is set, and more than matches previous, more extravagant productions.

There is a freshness and modernity, whilst completely retaining the authentic period feel, which reaches out and pulls the audience in.

Ideally crafted to be toured, and richly deserving of a national audience, Salisbury audiences can consider themselves very lucky to continue to have work of this quality on its doorstep.

In Tim Luscombe’s carefully crafted adaptation the subtle nuances of Austen’s writing are brought to the fore.

An unmissable piece of theatre.

Tim Luscombe’s adaptation will delight with a fairy tale happy ending.

Period drama at its best. 

There's no dusty bygone age here, only a powerful love story which will leave you breathless at the end. 

Brilliant! Beg borrow or blag a ticket.

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Persuasion (adapted from Jane Austen by Tim Luscombe)

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Note for amateur companies from Tim Luscombe
I wrote this adaptation specifically for Salisbury Playhouse at a time of economic uncertainty and cutbacks in arts funding. I was commissioned to get Austen’s novel on to the stage using no more than ten actors, which, considering the frugality of the times,
was pretty generous! Using this obstacle as an opportunity, the cast was constructed to employ six women and four men. You could argue that much of the doubling I suggested for the first production makes artistic sense. For instance, Mary Musgrove and Mrs Smith is a nice double. Both deal with ill health – Mary’s is imagined and she copes badly, while Mrs Smith’s is all too real and she copes well. I also thought it was interesting to have two of
Anne’s suitors (Benwick and Mr Elliot) played by the same actor. This whole arrangement was the best I could do, making sure the appropriate characters tell the story, while maintaining the minimum amount of changes, and presenting transformations that are readable from the audience’s point of view.

However, if your company has the opportunity to open the play up to a larger group of actors, then there is scope here to use anything up to 23 people. If you wanted to make the street scenes particularly spectacular, you could use even more bodies!
However, ten would seem to be the minimum necessary for a successful production.

For those of you who know and care about these things, you’ll notice that I’ve re-christened Charles Hayter (to avoid confusion with all the other Charles in the story!). He’s now Joseph Hayter. I’ve given Mrs Smith a first name, Henrietta. And I’ve lost a
Musgrove daughter.

The challenges that the play presents, in terms of production, aren’t enormous, but some do exist. There’s a fair amount of dancing. There’s even a bit of singing. And there’s a rainstorm. The text suggests a piano here and there. Might it be good to have
it on all the time? And Louisa has to have something by way of a Cobb to fall off. In the script, I could suggest recycling the Harville’s dining table, but I’m sure there are a million ways to do a Cobb. The other thing to spend energy on getting right is costume. Especially if you’re working with a cast of ten. Any permutation that reduces the novel to a cast of that size is going to lean heavily on a clever and witty costume design. If you’re working with doubling/trebling etc., you’ll see that whenever an actor has to change character, I’ve given him or her a reasonable time offstage in which to do it. For example, they’re rationally written out of a scene early if they’re on in the next scene as a new character etc. 

I hope that the amount of music suggested in the text might lead a director to imagine asking for even more in a production, to support the emotional topography. I sense music could be used quite filmically. But that’s just an idea.

The scenes should run into each other as much as possible, to keep the pace up. Stage directions indicate where the action mustn’t stop at all. And generally, long scene changes are the enemy. This might imply a lack of emphasis on great clunky sets
and furniture, and more importance placed on more gestural, fluid settings – with sound helping a lot.

It would be useful if the actress playing Anne can play the piano, although I suppose there are always means of disguising it if she can’t. The same for the actress who plays Lady Dalrymple. In the current character/actor arrangement, the Admiral Croft/ Mr
Harville actor needs to be able to sing.

The song in the Concert scene in Act Two was inserted so that Anne has time to change from wet to dry (from the Rain scenes to the Concert scene). However, if your production doesn’t render rain literally, then the song could be cut right down, or even eliminated.

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