Is it possible for a production to be both boring and heavy-handed?  This is a rhetorical question. I already know the answer.

The answer is yes.  Mansfield Park was both boring and heavy-handed.  It’s the most unusual and un-Jane like of Austen’s novels, I think, and it works because it is subtle enough to take a few days to settle in to the subconscious.  Its message is hard to get a grasp of.  The characters who impart the ultimate meaning to the novel aren’t very dynamic or interesting.  Appealing maybe, but vanilla.

The BBC production handed it all over, sometimes inaccurately, I think, on a platter.  Here…I give to you this story and here is its meaning.  London = cesspool of sin and deception.  Country estate = civilized and reserved behavior.  Fanny was too perfect and too straightforward a vehicle for Austen’s point.  Mary Crawford was the very model of beautiful devil woman – and wow was she beautiful – but she overdid her part big time.    Fanny’s aunt was a pinched shrew.  Sir Thomas seemed like a bipolar alcoholic...one minute he was prescient and sensible and kind and the next minute he was ranting and abusive.  Everybody else was so dull that I can’t even pretend to have anything to say about them.  Hooray, Edward and Fanny got together in the end.  It’s hard for me to be excited about this.  1)  They are first cousins, so…ick and 2) I can only imagine that without the excitement of the cast of wackos who live at and visit Mansfield Park, they’ll be even more boring…but forever, not just an hour and a half.

I’m sad.  I want to love every one of these productions.  I also feel mean, because nobody did a BAD job in Mansfield Park, but nobody really did a great job either.  Except for the costume and set folks…pretty dresses…more cleavage than usual, and everybody was clean and coiffed beyond what is, I think, historically accurate, but high marks all around for the aesthetics.