Laura Wade is a playwright and screenwriter. Her recent plays include The Watsons and Home, I'm Darling which won the 2019 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Film work includes The Riot Club, adapted from her play Posh. She is currently developing several feature films, including a major book adaptation with Blueprint Pictures, and is an executive producer and writer on Jilly Cooper's Rivals for Disney+.
the watsons
By Laura Wade
Directed by Joan Bryans
Jericho Arts Centre: May 2 - 18, 2025
Emma Watson is 19 and new in town. She's been cut off by her rich aunt and dumped back in the family home. Emma and her sisters must marry, fast. If not, they face poverty, spinsterhood, or worse: an eternity with their boorish brother and his awful wife. Luckily there are plenty of potential suitors to dance with, from flirtatious Tom Musgrave to castle-owning Lord Osborne, who's as awkward as he is rich. So far so familiar. But there's a problem: Jane Austen didn't finish the story. Who will write Emma's happy ending now?
Based on her incomplete novel, this sparklingly witty play, appearing in North America for the first time, looks under the bonnet of Jane Austen and asks: What can characters do when their author abandons them?
" playful and serious at the same time... Wade has seized on the tension between authorial control and imaginative freedom to create a stunning play" ~ The Guardian ★★★★★
"An affectionate and entertaining skewering of the Jane Austen comfort zone " ~ The Telegraph ★★★★
"A brilliant, if wayward creation, in which Wade, rather than tacking an ending on to Austen's fragment, plunges into it to explore, among other things, the creative process and the value of art" ~ The Times ★★★★
This is an amateur production.