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Saturday, March 25, 2006

Saturday, March 25, 2006 12:11 am by M.   1 comment
Norfolk Eastern Daily Press reviews the Norwich's production of After Mrs. Rochester that we presented some days ago.

Yes, that's the first Mrs Rochester, the hair-raising fire raiser, the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. But Polly Teale is not concerned to make a drama out of the mysteries that Charlotte Bronte left in her famous novel. Instead, she does something more exciting. She traced patterns of appalling obsessions in the life of a writer that can only be resolved by projecting them into the fictional character. (...)

Director Clare Howard's success is to make the narrative frame persuasive while also creating a sequence of compelling episodes. None is more striking than the few seconds devoted to an impression of a steam ship about to sail, with just a few details of bustle working on our imaginations.

A permanent set surrounded by foliage and the whirr of insects off stage suggests that there is a jungle out there, whether it's as real or just metaphorical. Mental stresses are embodied in the figure of the wretched, insane Mrs Rochester always present, never integrated until the end.

A strong cast, mainly female, works together in this play of ideas. Vivienne Hillier has strength as Jean Rhys, and Nika Obydzinski is her troubled younger self, and Tawa Kesington has vivacity and verve. Ruth Howitt is the very picture of mental imbalance, while Amy Michaels takes three crisply differentiated character roles. (Christopher Smith)

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1 comment:

  1. Okay, but seriously: I've read this review three times now and I still don't understand exactly what the reviewer is trying to say.

    It wasn't until I went back and read your earlier post about this production that I realized that the writer mentioned in that first paragraph of this review, with the "appalling obsessions" is not, in fact, Charlotte Bronte -- but is really Jean Rhys.

    And then this sentence is all kinds of problems: "Director Clare Howard's success is to make the narrative frame persuasive while also creating a sequence of compelling episodes." While each of those words is recognizable, strung together like that they lose coherence. Instead, it looks like someone got a new thesaurus for Christmas.

    It sounds less like this should be called Mrs Rochester and more like it should be called Return to the Wide Sargasso Sea.

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