The Watsons
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https://www.adelaide.edu.au/theatreguild/whats-on
Date Reviewed: 03/08/2025
It is never easy to be an artist. And while being a female artist comes with even more challenges, a central message of Laura Wade’s The Watsons is this: never be ashamed to call yourself one.
Inspired by Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons begins in familiar Austen territory—dance halls, matchmaking, and women navigating a world where their choices are painfully limited. Emma Watson, recently cut off from her wealthy aunt, is back into a society where marriage is her only option. As she puts it, “Some things are beyond even the control of women.”
And then things change.
In a witty and unexpected twist, the playwright herself enters the scene disguised as a maid. She reveals that Emma is a fictional character in Austen’s incomplete novel. What follows is no longer a structured play, but an open dialogue between character and creator—raising questions about agency, authorship and the constraints placed on women then and now.
The characters begin to resist. Emma doesn’t want a neat, conventional ending. The women around her seek more than the roles they’ve been written into. A meeting is called. What unfolds is chaotic, subversive and strangely moving: rebellion, shifting alliances and even a budding romance between Lady Osborne and the nanny. The story fractures—and so does the hierarchy of power.
Wade transforms Austen’s unfinished pages into a space for exploration, freedom, self-determination, creativity and the right to write your own ending. In doing so, she gently suggests that perhaps Austen left the story unfinished on purpose. Perhaps she wanted to leave Emma, and her readers, with an open ending—a space to imagine, rewrite, and reclaim.
The play becomes a love letter to women who dare to think for themselves, to characters who don’t comply and to storytellers who break the rules. It’s a bold reminder that narratives can be re imagined—and that imagination is, in itself, a radical act.
What begins as a period drama evolves into a sharp, feminist and playful interrogation of storytelling itself.
And as Emma says before the end: “Are you ready? Here’s what I think should happen…”
What happens next is no longer up to Austen. It’s up to Emma—and perhaps, by extension, up to all of us.
Performance Dates
• Friday 1 August at 7:30pm
• Saturday 2 August at 3:00pm
• Sunday 3 August at 3:00pm
• Wednesday 6 August at 6:30pm
• Thursday 7 August at 7:30pm
• Friday 8 August at 7:30pm
• Saturday 9 August at 3:00pm
• Sunday 10 August at 3:00pm
Reviewed by Argyro Vourdoumpa