Catherine Morland’s hopeless addiction to Gothic novels wreaks havoc on her imagination. Her quiet, bookish life in rural Hampshire suddenly becomes more exciting when she is taken, as her Aunt’s companion, to enter the leisure society at Bath.

There she meets the duplicitous Thorpe siblings Isabella and John, along with Eleanor Tilney and her brother Henry, a suave and sardonic clergyman with whom she begins to fall in love. As invitation to Henry’s ancestral home, Northanger Abbey, fuels Catherine’s deepening obsessions until her mind is so dominated by fantasy that the edges of fiction and reality begin to blur.

This Salisbury Playhouse production of Austen’s novel transports you to a time of high-tea in Bath (cucumber sandwiches optional).