Dear viewer, it's up to you

Today it's the turn of The Herald presenting the new BBC Jane Eyre adaptation. Marissa Duffy quotes Toby Stephens, Ruth Wilson, Susannah White and Diederick Santer, commenting different aspects of the production that more or less have been reported previously already.

The unavoidable Colin Firth comparison:

More than a decade after Firth emerged, dripping, from the water in a BBC television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the BBC is preparing to unveil that other brooding nineteenth-century ladies' man – Mr Rochester.

Being Rochester is a big opportunity and a big responsability:

"In terms of my career, it is one of the best things that has happened to me." (...) I feel a responsibility because so many people have read the book and have their own image of how Rochester will look and behave."

The sideburns...

"The problem with doing period dramas is that you do look like a weirdo for months on end. I had these huge sideburns which I longed to shave off towards the end, but in the beginning I was desperate for them to grow so I could see what I would look like with them."

... and the extensions.

"The extensions kept on falling out at really inopportune times," he recalls. "I was at a dinner party sitting beside this woman who I didn't really know, and at one point she looked down at my shoulder in horror and asked: 'What on earth is that?', pointing at a dead extension which had fallen out. It had a horrible yellow waxy blob on the end."

Rochester, the pin-up?

"Rochester has always been a bit of a pin-up," [Sandy Welch] says with a laugh. "He is undoubtedly one of my favourite characters in literature, and you can't escape the fact that a lot of the classic novels are very popular not only because they have sympathetic female characters, but very fanciable males, too.
"I don't think you can avoid that, but I don't think it is necessarily the dumbing-down of the book, because the novel is about a passionate affair; this fantastic relationship." Welch admits that she has created a sympathetic version of Rochester in keeping with what she believes was the intention of Brontë. "In the book he is very surly, distant and grumpy, but he is also very good in company. He's a glittering host – he sings and has a great sense of humour. He is a multi-faceted character. The aim of the book is not to make Jane a foolish girl by falling in love with this horrible fellow."

And the importance of the locations:

"One of the things the director and I did straight away was to put as many scenes as we could outdoors," says Welch. "We wanted to make the estate like a world of its own, so once Jane arrives, it's a new world which opens up to her. This is where she begins to fall in love with Rochester."

Categories: In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV