The Watsons

By Laura Wade,

Directed by Stuart Watson

Tuesday 21 to Saturday 25 April 2026 at 7.45pm with a Saturday matinee at 3pm

Putney Arts Theatre - Main Stage

About the play:

What can characters do when their author abandons them?

Nineteen and new in town, Emma Watson has been cast off by her rich aunt and banished back to the family home. Unless she can marry, and quickly, she faces a life of impoverished spinsterhood, dependent on her boorish brother and his ghastly wife.

Fortunately, a ball is being held in town, and she has plenty of suitors to dance with, from debonair but fickle Tom Musgrave to loaded but awkward Lord Osborne. Whose advances should she accept?

But that’s where Jane Austen put down her pen. Two centuries later Emma’s happy ending still hangs in the balance. Who will step in to finish the story?

Laura Wade’s inventive, sparklingly witty play looks under the bonnet of Jane Austen and asks: What happens when the writer loses the plot?

The Watsons premiered at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester in 2018 and transferred to the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2019, earning a handful of five star notices. A West End run was slated to follow in 2020 and the posters were printed, but then the pandemic happened.

It starts as a more-or-less faithful adaptation of the unfinished Jane Austen novel, featuring a cast of characters many of whom are familiar from other Austen stories. The Watson sisters appear to be prototypes of Lizzie and the Bennett girls, there is a caddish Wickham, a Darcy (without the redeeming features), a Lady Catherine de Burgh, and so on.

But about a third of the way through the play Laura Wade’s source material runs out, and she takes the play in an unexpected and brilliantly imaginative new direction as the Regency clashes with the 21^st century and the characters begin to behave in unpredictable and wildly funny ways.

This amateur production of “The Watsons” is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd. on behalf of Samuel French Ltd. www.concordtheatricals.co.uk

Suitable for audiences aged 11 and above.

Tickets will be on sale soon.