Miss Eyre, more reviews

Theatre.com reviews the London performances of the revival of the Polly Teale's theatrical adaptation of Jane Eyre.

(...) Teale writes in a programme note that she found in Jane Eyre “a psychological drama of the most powerful kind” in which everything and everyone in the story is seen “larger than life through the magnifying glass of Jane’s psyche.”

And on the magnifying glass of the stage, Teale is able to expand and elucidate the idea that, “hidden inside the sensible, frozen Jane exists another self who is passionate and sensual. Bertha (trapped in the attic) embodies the fire and longing which Jane must lock away in order to survive in Victorian England.” But while the free Jane is imprisoned by convention, the locked-away Bertha is liberated in Jane’s mind.

As this brief précis suggests, this is a production that seeks to do something far more ambitious than merely replay the plot across three hours. As in all their work, they seek to interact and intervene with the source material, establishing a contract between the actors and the audience that is about making “a shared experience” of the event. Bringing its own penetrating psychological insights to the story, the production also achieves this with a piercing theatricality, born of the actors’ captivating physical expressiveness that only occasionally drifts into self-consciousness. Underscored by a mournful cello and performed beneath a screen of a stormy sky, a company of just eight brilliantly explore the inner life of both the novel and the lives they are portraying.

Most thrilling of all, Monica Dolan returns the title role that she originally created (opposite James Clyde’s Mr. Rochester and Myriam Acharki’s Bertha) with an exquisite luminosity that makes Jane Eyre’s slow journey of independence towards self-acceptance and being able to accept love a uniquely moving one. (Mark Shenton)

In the picture: Monica Dolan & Myriam Acharki in Jane Eyre.

Categories: Jane_Eyre, Theatre, In_the_News