Jane Eyre 2006 on Australian ABC... and in Norway

As you will have seen in the weekly TV alerts on our sidebar, the Australian channel ABC will broadcast the first two episodes of Jane Eyre 2006 this coming Sunday at 8.30pm. The Sydney Morning Herald has a long post on the series.

"It is really about a relationship between two individuals and that's what it should be about, rather than a period setting or the costumes," she [Ruth Wilson] says. Edward Rochester (Toby Stephens), the story's Byronic posterboy, is a moody, emotional man with a difficult temper. As with most of her literary contemporaries, Jane Eyre is talented, passionate and yearns to marry for love. More importantly, her name is on the front of the book.
"Jane Eyre is the story of a classic heroine," Wilson says. "It's very challenging to know you have to fill these shoes. At the same time, if you get bogged down in that, you're going to lose yourself. You realise you just have to get on with it. It's quite daunting but at the same time it's a fantastic part." [...]
The series was adapted for the screen by Sandy Welch (North & South, Magnificent 7) and directed by Susanna White (Bleak House), who did not put Jane and Rochester - Wilson and Stephens - together until production had started on location at Haddon Hall.
"We never did a casting together, so we could have absolutely hated each other," Wilson says, assuring us they did not. "In the first week we had to work out the whole relationship."The series was adapted for the screen by Sandy Welch (North & South, Magnificent 7) and directed by Susanna White (Bleak House), who did not put Jane and Rochester - Wilson and Stephens - together until production had started on location at Haddon Hall.
"We never did a casting together, so we could have absolutely hated each other," Wilson says, assuring us they did not. "In the first week we had to work out the whole relationship." [...]
She concedes being cast as one of the greatest heroines of English literature with such inexperience is, in some ways, an extraordinary achievement and believes her own innocence played perfectly into capturing Jane's naive quality.
"I think it helped a great deal," she says. "The way it was structured and filmed we did six weeks filming where there was just Toby and me at the house. It was very intense and very intimate and we got on like a house on fire.
"Suddenly I was transported to a different house, different actors and Toby was gone, and really I felt uncomfortable. Then the house party was filmed. I was pushed out to the side and Toby was flirting with the other actresses and all those insecurities and feelings you have come to the surface."
Wilson describes White as "an incredibly compassionate" person. "She comes from a documentary background, so she's fascinated by people and I think she realised what each of us needed as an actor to tease things out of us. With Toby it was almost a matter of convincing him he could do it without doing too much. With me it was more about giving me a different idea or a different objective. We talked through every scene and she gave us all the time in the world." [...]
Wilson had read the book [Jane Eyre] twice - once at school and a second time just before filming began - and kept a copy of the book handy during production. "I went over some of the passages, which I found really helpful, just to get a fresh idea on what you're doing. But it is dangerous to get too bogged down in the book and too preoccupied with what's going on. I had to remind myself it is an adaptation and I had my own take on Jane. What was difficult, in some ways, is that Jane has so much going on underneath." [...]
Watching those interpretations, Wilson says, came with a much greater risk than reading the book. "I thought that if I watched other productions of Jane Eyre, I would just see the outside of her, that cold, cynical or quite funny exterior, and what I needed to find was the interior of her, the passion, the naivete. I didn't watch any of them and I did make a conscious effort not to."
The risks, she says, included "trying to copy it, or worse, trying to pull away from it consciously. Maybe if I had watched them I might have realised what a big job it was or what I had to do with it. I wanted to find my own take on it and I don't think it's particularly helpful watching something like that."
Welch and White's interpretation of the tale is spectacular. Producer Diederick Santer says Welch mined the novel for "every ounce of passion, drama, colour, madness and horror available, bringing to life Jane's inner world with beauty, humour and, at times, great sadness".
It wallows in the darkest and brightest moments of Jane's life: her dreadful childhood, when her wealthy, spiteful aunt Mrs Reed (Fitzgerald) neglects her in favour of her own three spoiled children, and her stormy time as governess of Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with the "alluring and unpredictable" Edward Rochester. The Times said Stephens's performance as Rochester was "convincing" and "sternly seductive".
At the same time, it is by no means definitive - that honour curiously belongs to the 1944 film version starring Fontaine, Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor. Wilson's acknowledgement that many Jane Eyres came before her and many will come after reflects the curious immortality of the character.
"That's why good plays and good books like Jane Eyre can always be retold because you can find something new in them." (Michael Idato)

Interesting article. It was a long time since we had read such a new, in-depth kind of article on the series.

Something remarkable - and not for the right easons - that we have come across today is this list compiled by All About Romance where Jane Eyre makes it to position 52. The list, apart from including a respectable Pride and Prejudice as well, is made up of Nora Roberts' and Amanda Quick's and the like's novels. Not that we have anything against them - although to be perfectly honest we don't like them at all - but once again we don't think that Jane Eyre belongs there.

In brief: Blue Stocking has just read Villette and talks about it. Literary Studies reviews Wuthering Heights. Leeds and me posts a few pictures of a recent trip to Haworth and the moors with descriptions in Spanish. The New Zealand Herald reviews a current production of The Mystery of Irma Vep, now on stage at the Silo Theatre. And Spanish Actress Blanca Marsillach picks Wuthering Heights as the movie that marked her life in an interview in El Confidencial. She doesn't say but we suppose she means the 1939 version.

EDIT:
Jane Eyre 2006 will also be aired tonight in Norway. On NRK1, at 21:35 (the episode will be repeated next Friday, November 30, at 20:00 on NRK3). This article in Aftenposten provides additional details.

Categories: Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Theatre, Villette, Wuthering Heights