New stage adaptation of A Room with a View is shimmering, irrepressible joy

E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, A Room with a View, follows the journey of a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, as she navigates her way through the strictures of Edwardian society to follow her own path to love and happiness.

The title is the clue, with the novel exploring its themes and character relationships through a series of oppositions: the closed room/expansive view; England/Italy; intellect/passion; male/female and so on.

The story is also likely familiar to many through the acclaimed 1985 Merchant-Ivory film – lushly beautiful, highly romantic, and one that faithfully reproduces the central love story of the original.

But in Grace Chapple’s delightful and incisive play adaptation, the story shimmers and refocusses and settles into 2026. Conventional binaries and social expectations are critically inspected, blurred and reconfigured.

Our first sight of Zoë Atkinson’s set is not exactly prepossessing. We see a wall of depressingly grey roller blinds, atop an expanse of office-grey carpet. (On closer inspection, a faint floral pattern is revealed: the landscape and nature have infiltrated the play’s interior spaces, too.)

Behind the blinds are monumental green Crittall windows and doors stretching from one side of the stage to the other, creating many rooms and views in both Italy and England.

This rigid structure is sometimes literally an obstacle for the performers. But, like the stifling social conventions of Edwardian England some are chafing against, the performers work both with it and around it – in one instance, playing a game of tennis around it, beautifully choreographed by Elle Evangelista.

Polite words, and impolite feelings

The play opens with Lucy (Nathalie Morris) and her chaperoning cousin Charlotte (Hayley McElhinney) throwing open the window of their hotel room in Florence – to discover that there is, in fact, no promised view.

We know this because a cardboard sign is held up outside the window, proclaiming “No View”. This gets an instant first laugh from the audience, and sets the scene for director Hannah Goodwin’s strategic and intelligent production, which both stages the action and comments on it.

The play combines enactment of the story within the fictional world with a liberal dose of characters also directly addressing the audience in asides. They quote from the novel and give us insights into personal motivations, grievances and so on, often to hilarious effect when polite words do not match impolite feelings.

This underscores in new ways the social satire that was an intrinsic part of Forster’s novel.

The actors, too, consciously reflect on their situation within this world. Morris, in particular, is the master of the side eye or slightly raised eyebrow, directed at a complicit audience.

Throughout the production, director, writer and actors repeatedly invite their audiences not to accept the status quo, not to be diminished by convention. Even Charlotte, the most apparently conventional of all, is ultimately revealed as having altogether more complexity and agency than we initially assume.

We see this especially clearly in the love relationships between the characters.

The film’s most memorable scene involved George Emerson forcefully scooping up a very young Lucy and kissing her passionately in a beautiful field outside Florence – the epitome of the romantic masterful hero/demure, innocent heroine trope. But George (Luke Wiltshire) and Lucy meet here, and in their other encounters, as consenting equals, and as adults.

This George is not the archetypal “dashing hero” – indeed, he appears often almost diffident. But he is absolutely a hero for our times.

This adaptation proactively also writes in love stories that Forster could not (but clearly yearned to). The audience is palpably delighted when the very repressed Reverend Beebe (the always outstanding Tom Conroy) and Lucy’s brother Freddy (Tomáš Kantor, in one of several devastatingly charming characters he creates) kiss.

The power of theatre

Picking up on the theme of Lucy’s love of the piano, and Beethoven in particular, the music (Grace Ferguson) and sound (Madeleine Picard) are a key part of making this production’s world.

The actors playing a single note on the piano evoke the skipping of a stone across the Arno River or the “plonk” of a tennis ball. A pond is conjured out of nothing when Freddy dips his toe in and out of the “water”, summoning up a watery soundscape. This becomes a prelude to a riotous scene in which the beautiful naked Roman statues Lucy covertly admired in Florence come unexpectedly to life for her in deepest Surrey!

This production generates irrepressible, engaged joy as we eagerly follow these characters stumbling through life, discovering who they are and who they want to become.

A Room with a View confirms again the power of theatre as a shared space, where actors and audience co-create a world – and maybe even model what might be possible beyond Belvoir’s magical corner stage.

A Room with a View is at Belvoir, Sydney, until November 1, then touring to Melbourne and Perth.