There’s a terrific irony at the heart of A Universal Truth, Patrick Einheber’s strategic game of courtship. Jane Austen did a number on us with Emma and Sense & Sensibility and all the others. The Regency didn’t even last a decade, but it might as well represent an eternal summer, flushed with evening balls and surprise elopements, chilled by spurned advances and declined proposals of marriage, and above all marked by the triumph of true love over the tightly laced bodice of propriety.

A Universal Truth is… not that. If anything, it rears back to give the laces an extra heave.

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