Again Mrs. Rochester in Jamaica

The performances of Pollly Teale's After Mrs. Rochester in Kingston, Jamaica conclude today, October 21, and The Jamaica Gleaner gives another review of the production:

Brian Heap has created a great open set that gets strewn with the detritus and mess of Rhys' life as the play proceeds. Rhys had a passion for clothes and we see this borne out as she undergoes changes from schoolgirl to chorus girl to kept woman to writer. The men in the play are also carefully and cleverly permutated by having the same actor play dual or even triple roles. Rhys' doting father, Rees Williams, a doctor, played by Rooney Chambers, becomes the boyfriend in her first passionate affair (with Lancelot Smith), while the Rochester character of Jane Eyre, played by Karl Williams, also plays Ford Madox Ford. Ford was Rhys' mentor at the beginning of her career as a professional writer. He involved her in a bizarre ménage à trois with himself and his wife, Stella Bowen, at a time when she was vulnerable since her husband, the journalist, Jean Lenglet, was serving time for fraud. Rhys was desperate for a man to solve her life. The play shows us several lovers and two husbands. Rhys in fact had three husbands, for after divorcing Lenglet, she married her agent Leslie Tilden-Smith, and then Tilden-Smith's cousin, Max Hamer, who also spent time in jail before dying of a heart attack. The elisions and compression work well in After Mrs. Rochester. We are well acquainted with Rhys' dependencies and passions by the time she is matured and do not need to see the details of her life further depicted. (Read more)

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