Penny Ashton has travelled New Zealand and the world bringing the f-words – feminist, funny and frocks – to award-winning stage versions of Jane Austen’s famous novels, but she would have laughed out loud if you’d told her teenage self that she’d one day play these roles.
Penny, a comedian, actor, poet, wedding celebrant and podcaster, thought English literature was “boring” and “pratty” when she was a student in her hometown of Christchurch.
“Reading every single thing into something that was written, I thought, ‘Maybe I’m a bit stupid?’ I couldn’t see all the layers. I found it quite tedious, so I thought, ‘Maybe it’s beyond me.’ I stopped doing English and did drama instead.”
This year marks a significant anniversary for Penny. It’s 10 years – half her theatre career – since she launched her one-woman show Promise and Promiscuity: A New Musical by Jane Austen and Penny Ashton.
As Millicent in Promise and Promiscuity.
Penny, 49, says she owes her love for Austen to time spent in the UK when Austen’s books were being developed into big-screen period dramas, starring the likes of Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman.
“I saw Sense and Sensibility at The Empire on this giant screen by myself, and I went, ‘Oh, my God!’ I loved everything about it and I hadn’t quite realised that I really love a period drama, that era. But if people ask me if I wanted to be alive then, I’m like, ‘Hell no!’ But I love the costumes, I love the language and Austen’s stories are great.”
Since 2013, Promise and Promiscuity has been performed to thousands of people in New Zealand’s largest city theatres to its smallest country halls, as well as in Australia, Canada, Britain and Ireland.
Penny also joined forces with fellow comic Lori Dungey for Austen Found: The Lost Musicals of Jane Austen, and Christchurch’s Court Theatre has just finished staging Penny’s version of Sense and Sensibility.
Along the way, she learned of an astonishing family connection to Austen. Rumour has it that Jane was in love with Irishman Thomas Langlois Lefroy who, after ditching her and marrying up, may have become the inspiration for her most famous leading man, Mr Darcy. In 2017, when Penny was performing Promise and Promiscuity in Ireland, her uncle David emailed to say that she is the fifth great-niece of Lefroy.
“He wrote, ‘You seem to be doing a lot about Jane Austen, but you might be curious to know you might be related to her lover.’
Performing with husband Matt Harvey.
It’s a bit of a stretch to describe Lefroy that way, but I knew exactly who he was because I’d been doing a lot of research and seen the movie Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy. Some say he was the inspiration for Mr Darcy, which could be wild conjecture, but his nephew did move to Australia, which is where my mum is from, so we run with it.”
Penny’s shows are cheeky and packed with innuendo, but amid the laughs, pop culture references and music, there are witty and relevant observations of women’s lives then and now. The treatment Austen, and women of her era, received is woven into each script. Penny says given the restrictions on women in Austen’s day, it’s a miracle she wrote what she did in her short life.
“She couldn’t even leave the house without a chaperone,” tells Penny. “She wasn’t allowed to get a job because it was regarded as ‘unseemly’, so she writes what she knows really well, invents a style of narrative, is hilarious – her irony and satire, I love her spinster shade – and then when her books are produced, it’s relegated as ‘women’s stuff’.”
It’s not difficult, says Penny, to see contemporary parallels to Austen’s stories.
“Sense and Sensibility starts with the Dashwood sisters and their mother facing homelessness because they cannot afford a place of their own, and must rely on male relatives – or husbands – for financial support. Housing insecurity and homelessness continue to cause problems for women.”
That interest in women’s past triumphs and tragedies has led Penny to create other shows like Olive Copperbottom: A Dickensian Tale of Love, Gin and the Pox and now, a new take on William Shakespeare’s plays called Tempestuous (expect female characters to be front and centre) which opens in Auckland in June.
She’s also created the podcast Showy Ovaries, where, through a series of candid interviews, she learns what to expect from menopause. Guests have included Robyn Malcolm, Miriama Kamo and Angela Bloomfield.
“The learning curve for me has been enormous – don’t take no for an answer and advocate for yourself,” Penny says. “We’ve worked our way through taboos, we’ve worked our way through the taboo of pregnancy, we’re working our way through taboos around periods and period poverty, and now we have come to the latter stage, which is menopause, and we’re now trying to de-shame and de-mystify everything around that.”
