Jane Austen gazes out from the £10 notes handed over for interval ice-creams. Or is she glaring? Her inscrutable expression is now printed on the currency that Austen’s despairing female protagonists were desperate to secure through marriage. These particular notes are changing hands at the Nottingham Playhouse, where yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is being staged.

Comedian Sara Pascoe is the latest to wrestle with the modern-day relevance of Austen’s marriage plotting. Out goes the Regency-era restraint, along with any shred of subtext. Using a play-within-a-play structure, this new version careers between a GCSE English cheat-sheet and an attempt at pithy contemporary critique.

The production sprints through an abridged Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet, her four squawking sisters, her distressed mother and dismissive father must navigate various marriage contracts and the gossip of the landed gentry in early 19th-century England. Pascoe argues that the effectiveness of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s romance relies on Regency-era repression and says she’d resisted updating her adaptation because of this necessary emotional context. But you’d be hard pressed to find any sort of repression – or depth of emotion – on the stage, where the gaggle of insufferable Bennet sisters and their nervy mother squeal, shriek and swoon over their marriage prospects for close to three hours, fluttering about in a gigantic gilded birdcage.

That enormous cage, the first sign of trouble, seems to embody how the production reduces every person and pivotal moment in the novel to a handful of digestible symbols and traits. Ignored middle child Mary Bennet, who is clever but pedantic and overlooked for her prettier, wittier sisters, is collapsed into a walking non-sequitur who interrupts every conversation with dull, arbitrary one-liners – funny for about five minutes, a forced running joke for the next two hours. Each sister might as well be wearing a list of character traits from CliffsNotes on her forehead.

There’s a sense that director Susannah Tresilian and Pascoe want to topple both the reverence surrounding the original text and the earnest struggle for the authentic in the long march of adaptations that have come before. Matt Whitchurch’s Mr Darcy is less a portrayal of Darcy than a caricature of Colin Firth’s brooding figure in Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC miniseries, where every lingering look and set jaw was heavily underscored by dramatic, lush violins. But this production also references attempts at irreverent parody and reinvention. “Maybe he’s a zombie!” cries one of the Bennet girls about a possible suitor, a nudge-wink namecheck for a popular if ridiculous Austen reworking with the walking dead.

The inner play is framed by scenes from the present day that give a diluted commentary on how Austen has been endlessly put together and taken apart, whether in school or in pop culture. There are a handful of metatheatrical scenes from the rehearsal room, where the actors struggle to make sense of their characters and the play’s “director” (Kerry Peers, doubling as Mrs Bennet) gives one of those pseudo-revelatory TED talks on Austen’s “radical feminism”. In a secondary school classroom, a long-suffering teacher (Bethan Mary-James, doubling as Elizabeth) tries to explain the book’s themes to bored schoolgirls in short skirts, inserting politically correct terms such as “heteronormative” along the way. Elsewhere, a film director and an editor discuss Tom Hooper-esque closeups of filmed scenes from the inner play as they embark on a parallel dalliance too briefly sketched for a satisfying payoff.

The result is a scattershot selection of loose themes and problems from Austen’s oeuvre. To add to this ambitious sprawl, there’s a musical soundtrack and original songs by Emmy the Great where the Bennet sisters sing reedy harmonies about their circumstances (“It’s not funny / we need money, money, money”) that might have found a good home in a Saturday Night Live musical comedy sketch, but not in such an overstuffed production.

It isn’t that Pascoe doesn’t have smart, sharp observations about womanhood, complex relationships and intimacy. Her standup comedy is a winning combination of loose-limbed awkwardness and taut humour that seems to have evaporated here to be replaced by low shots and cheap jokes. The simpering vicar Mr Collins, for instance, attempts a Trump handshake on another character, a cultural reference that’s proud of itself but comes about two months after it was interesting. The overwrought humour throws into relief the fact that Austen, and Pride and Prejudice, were terrifically funny without any help at all.

The show capitulates towards the end, abruptly giving up the potshots at pop culture to decide it really does want to see Elizabeth and Darcy make it work. Unfortunately this relationship, never taken seriously till then, lacks any genuine affection to glue the pair together.

As much as we vaunt the progress we’ve made in gender parity since the early 19th century, levels of equality are still wildly uneven around the globe – and marriage, to be utilitarian, is a social contract that still provides economic perks. We’re still marrying for property, for rights of residency (green cards, EU citizenship), for a long list of state-sanctioned benefits – and, if we’re lucky, for companionship and that nebulous thing we call love. I don’t think Austen saw her 19th-century women as poor creatures to be pitied. They were deeply romantic as much as they were ruthlessly practical, and they manoeuvred their way into getting both the money and the man despite the social and legal obstacle courses, saying very funny things along the way.

Austen remains universally beloved and eternally misunderstood, much like the dubious quote that goes with her portrait on the £10 note. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” goes the ironic exclamation from Elizabeth’s nemesis Caroline Bingley, who despises reading. Everyone’s fighting to put their own frames on Austen’s heroines and take them out of context: beautiful, plain, likable, unlikable, taking everything incredibly seriously, not taking anything seriously, radical feminist, secret feminist, secretly not feminist. But her characters are so complex they still slip from our grasp with every interpretation. I suppose that is why, as those £10 notes continue to circulate, so will new adaptations of her novels.

• Pride and Prejudice is at Nottingham Playhouse until 30 September. Box office: 0115-941 9419. Then at York Theatre Royal, 4–14 October. Box office: 01904 623568.