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This summer, we are delighted to welcome Moving Parts Theatre to Strawberry Hill House with a sparkling new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — performed at the birthplace of gothic literature.

Is it a spine-tingling tale of dark corridors and hidden secrets? Or a playful, sharp-eyed Regency romance? With Jane Austen, it is never quite that simple, and that is precisely the delight.

Written in affectionate conversation with the Gothic novels that followed The Castle of Otranto, Austen’s Northanger Abbey gently satirises the thrills of haunted castles and overactive imaginations. There could be no more fitting stage than Horace Walpole’s ‘little Gothic castle’.

Following the acclaimed success of last summer’s Vanity Fair, Moving Parts returns with a fresh and inventive take on the classics. This brand-new adaptation written and co-created by Joanna Nevin, Martin South and Simona Hughes is brought to life with an original musical score by Tamara Douglas-Morris and dynamic movement direction by Nevena Stojkov.

At its centre is young Catherine Morland, devoted reader of “horrid” novels, dreamer of secrets and shadows, and hopeful heroine in a world of balls, bonnets and Bath society. As imagination and reality collide, Catherine must decide what kind of story she truly wants to inhabit.

Settle into our historic garden, and enjoy an evening of wit, romance and Gothic mischief under the open sky: where Austen’s playful parody meets the birthplace of the Gothic imagination.