Pride and Prejudice Podcast

Something you might not know about my hometown of Ballarat is that thousands of people all over the world know the city because of Pride and Prejudice and it’s all because of a small local theatre company I’m part of and their now internationally award-winning production which I helped create.

At the start of 2020, theatres worldwide were faced with universal cancellations of seasons and closure of performance spaces. Ballarat National Theatre was one of the thousands of companies impacted, postponing its entire season for the first time since they were founded in 1938.

Myself and my friend Olivia French met through performing together with BNT. At the start of April BNT, like all the theatre community, were looking at cancelled projects and shows and uncertainty stretching into the future. We reached out to our friends from the cast of BNT’s 2018 sell-out production of Pride and Prejudice to catch up on zoom and have fun reading their scripts one more time.

Austen’s writing has, for many years, been a place of solace for people worldwide. After World War I, it was prescribed to British soldiers to help them recover from PTSD. Something about Austen’s writing is so wholesome that people return to it, to find something familiar, as though a book were a home. As the BNT Pride and Prejudice cast returned to Austen for that same happy sense of community, Olivia and I came up with a revolutionary idea to take the beauty of Austen to our community: turning the Pride and Prejudice novel into a dramatized audiobook.

The project concept was incredibly ambitious. Oliva and I had minimal sound editing experience, had never delivered a podcast and neither of us had directed or narrated a show before. The novel is a whopping 125,000 words and needed adaption to prepare it for the type of production we wanted to do. We would need a big cast and a production team. But what we did have was a detailed and long-running knowledge of the story and the passionate backing of Ballarat National Theatre.

Looking back on what we had yet to build and learn and go through, the scope of what we were about to face was breathtaking. I became the project’s sound editor and director. I’m relieved I didn’t know the full scope at the time and I’m relieved I had Olivia as my co-creator. Without that ignorance and without Olivia, it probably would have crushed me.

The cast of the original stage production joined us, we pulled in some amazing actors to complete the remaining cast and they set to work. We each clocked around 30 hours per week on the project, on top of our full-time jobs. At first, Olivia and I thought that maybe our mum’s and a few of the BNT theatre community members would listen to our weekly episodes. To our surprise, we started getting messages on social media and emails from people further and further away. Soon we realised that something big was happening.

Olivia says that realisation was “like an answering light in the dark. We’d been so excited and had been working away in our own creative bubble on the podcast but the pandemic and isolation had taken its toll on us too, and we were tired. To realise that we were reaching others and making a difference in their lives really reignited the drive to keep going, to keep spreading that spark of joy.”

People began telling us the podcast had become a light in the darkness for them. Teachers from Arizona. Retirees from England. Nursing home workers. The story became something personal and letters flowed in from people grateful that they found a sense of community, belonging and humanity in Austen’s words. And that through the story, they weren’t alone.

Partway into the production, I set up a merchandise store for the theatre company to try and give the fans a way to feel connected to the story and to give something back to a small company that had worked so hard to bring the podcast to them. Olivia and I commissioned a design from local illustrator Annie Gonzales to incorporate into the merchandise. The store took off and became a little beacon of financial support for the company while theatres everywhere remained closed. Fans from Finland to France, America to Ireland bought themselves t-shirts, mugs, facemasks, and hoodies. They also sent the store fan mail asking when the next episodes would be published.

Our hard work continued to be recognised as we went on. The podcast entered the Australian iTunes charts in the Arts category five times, reaching as high as 75. Listeners tuned in from 121 different countries. The most popular countries for subscribers are the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand, Netherlands,
Philippines and India. The completed project is 30 episodes long and totals a whopping 14 hours and 27 minutes of entertainment. It has been downloaded over 300,000 times and took ten months to complete.

Finally, in April, the honorees and nominees for The Webby Awards were announced and Ballarat National Theatre received an email to say that our humble little podcast, had been announced as a Webby Award Honoree in the 25th Annual Webby Awards (Limited Series Podcast – Scripted Fiction). This award category had 5 honorees and 5 nominees comprising of podcasts from international names like HBO, Comedy Central and BBC. To have the name of a small, regional, Australian, not-for-profit theatre company alongside major, acclaimed production companies was a bit of a shock.

I rang Olivia when I found out. I called her and I didn’t really know what to say. I was speaking at a million miles an hour and none of it made any sense. I was simultaneously trying to explain how I had used my last $500 to enter us in and what the awards even were. It had been months before when I had entered and I had completely forgotten about them. After we talked about it we both kind of sat there and I kept wondering what do you even do with that information? I then rang one of my old theatre teachers who did know what the Webby’s were and he was so excited for me.

Earning the distinction of Webby Honoree, as recognized by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences is a significant achievement—granted to only the top 20% of the nearly 13,500 projects entered in the 25th Annual Webby Awards.

If you would like to listen to this internationally renowned, five-star reviewed production, you can find it at www.prideandprejudicepodcast.com.

And if you would like to be part of the passionate community that brought it together, then look for Ballarat National Theatre via www.bnt.org.au.