Breeches, Bonnets and Big Balls – Interview with Penny Ashton
Penny Ashton is New Zealand’s own global comedienne who has been making a splash on the world stage since 2002 and she has sold out shows from Edinburgh to Adelaide to Edmonton. She has four Best NZ Female Comedienne nominations, three Adelaide Fringe People’s Choice nominations, a Winnipeg Best in Fringe for Hot Pink Bits and won best performance by an International Poet at the London Farrago Awards.
Penny has represented New Zealand in The World Cup of Theatresports in Germany and Australasia in a Performance Poetry Slam Tournament Tour of the UK. In 2010 she performed by invitation at The Glastonbury Festival and reported from the Miss Universe Pageant in Las Vegas.
Hello and welcome to My Jane Austen Book Club,
Penny. Can we start saying how you came to discover Jane Austen and her work,
first of all?
I must confess to being forced to read Pride
and Prejudice in my first year of High School and finding it pretty dull. I,
like many others, had a change of heart upon watching 1995’s Pride and
Prejudice but even more so because of Ang Lee’s beautiful adaptation of Sense
and Sensibility. I simply adored that
film, particularly the character of Marianne. So I am afriad I am one of “those” people who love her screen
adaptations where to my mind they bring to life her best feature, which is her
sparkling dialogue.
