Your reviews, Miss Eyre

Two reviews for Polly Teale's Jane Eyre currently on stage in the West End.

The Times makes it clear from the start that this is not for literary conservatives:

If you want a straightforward version of Jane Eyre, perhaps with picturesque Merchant Ivory effects, then Polly Teale’s production for Shared Experience isn’t for you.
But if you think it legitimate for an adapter to pry into a text, you will find nothing bolder or more imaginative than a staging that is as much an investigation of the mind of Charlotte Brontë and her governess-heroine as a potent retelling of a terrific tale. [...]
Does Teale somewhat labour the point? Well, there were moments of such emotional pressure that both Bertha and Jane looked as if they themselves might go into labour. But that would be a serious objection only if the result were to sully or distort the narrative. As it is, the Shared Experience style — pacy, informal, inventive, physically expressive — keeps you gripped by what’s still Jane Eyre. It remains Brontë’s story of the orphan who becomes a governess and a governess who, after a little misunderstanding at the altar, ends up with — but please read the novel or go to Trafalgar Studios or, better, do both.

Read the whole review to see this Shared Experience Jane called "starchy" and "doughty" and this Mr Rochester "wild" and "raffish".

Then The Telegraph considers this is one of "the finest and most searching stage adaptations of a great novel I have ever seen".

The reason why this piece works so powerfully isn't hard to find: Jane Eyre is a masterpiece of storytelling. Charlotte Brontë's narrative grabs you from the start and never loosens its grip. Teale does it proud with a marvellously absorbing production that repeatedly goes right to the heart of the novel's most dramatic scenes.

Yes! Start by praising the original :D

But the show is a work of imagination as well as conscientious adaptation. Teale takes the view that Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic, the first Mrs Rochester, represent different aspects of the same person. [...]
We see Jane as a child imprisoned in the Red Room by her cruel guardians for displaying a sudden outburst of wild temper, just as mad Bertha is imprisoned in the attic by her troubled husband, Rochester. And throughout the performance it is the writhing, moaning, highly sexed Bertha who expresses the hidden emotional turmoil going on inside the heart and head of the apparently passive Jane.
This seems to me both a profound literary perception as well as a means to powerfully imaginative theatre, but then the whole production combines bravura theatricality with a sharp, probing intelligence.[...]
Dolan also achieves a potent chemistry with James Clyde's darkly Byronic Rochester, who takes to the stage like the 19th-century equivalent of a charismatic but ageing rock star, while the abandoned sensuality of Myriam Acharki's Bertha lends the show a thrill of eroticism.

See, here Rochester is "darkly Byronic", which sounds much better than "wild" and "raffish", doesn't it?

There are some who can't stick literary adaptations at any price, but this Jane Eyre succeeds as both a wise distillation of the novel and a thrilling piece of theatre in its own right.

Again that "warning". What? Are they scared the Jane Eyre integrists might go and sabotage the play? :P

Categories: Jane_Eyre, Theatre, In_the_News