Caird\u2019s justification for this reduction is compelling. In an interview<\/a>, he described Jane Eyre<\/a> as \u201cfundamentally an intimate, emotional, small-scale work\u201d, pointing to the novel\u2019s first-person narration and its intensely interior focus.<\/p>\n But Jane Eyre is not a \u201csmall-scale work\u201d. Certainly, Jane\u2019s journey takes her through only a handful of Yorkshire houses and a school. Yet Bront\u00eb\u2019s imagination repeatedly exceeds these confines. The novel conjures supernatural forces, wild landscapes and sweeping moorland. Its emotional world is equally expansive, moving from the warmth of passion to the terror of fire and freezing wastes. Its Yorkshire landscapes convey a strange, almost supernatural power. The result is a novel that constantly stretches beyond the limits of Jane\u2019s confined domestic world.<\/p>\n Through elemental forces Br\u00f6nte invokes the gothic mode which had fascinated her and her siblings since childhood. In Jane Eyre, she tempers gothic madness and passion with domestic realism. Jane\u2019s narration dwells on clothes, food, weather, teaching and the gentle boredom of Thornfield before Rochester\u2019s tumultuous arrival. Yet beneath this prosaic world lies a more dangerous emotional intensity.<\/p>\n Taking my seat at Southwark Playhouse, I was struck by how effectively Morgan Large\u2019s set balances intimacy with gothic grandeur. It captures the small scale Caird sought for this chamber production, while suggesting a much wider and eerier world beyond the stage.<\/p>\n The palette is black and white. The set backdrop is a video screen showing a slowly moving landscape of clouds, bare trees and wintry moorland. There is even a bit of mist rising. <\/p>\n Stage right and left are clothes horses draped with everyday cloaks, pristine white shirts, nightshirts and caps. These have a prosaic quality and bring the audience close to a theatrical version of Br\u00f6nte\u2019s domestic realism. However, even these well-starched clothes are imbued with a ghostly quality, bereft as they are of wearers and lit in sharp contrast to the black backdrop. It is a clever combination of the ghostly and the mundane, which renders the most familiar things uncanny<\/a>.<\/p>\n Jane Eyre: a Musical abounds in excellent performances, exciting staging and orchestration, but despite the verve of the ensemble cast and the vocal crescendos, the heart rarely skips a beat in fear \u2013 and certainly not in gothic terror. <\/p>\n This is largely due to the awkwardness and confusion in the representation of Bertha, who is little more than an obstacle in Jane and Rochester\u2019s romance. Played by Hannah Lindsay, she appears veiled in pale lace wedding clothes, her face obscured. Even when she attacks Rochester, Lindsay\u2019s long blonde curls hide her face. <\/p>\n Br\u00f6nte\u2019s creation of the violent, swollen-featured, monstrous Bertha who also has bad breath and hasn\u2019t brushed her hair is problematic to a modern audience. She is Creole and she is insane. What may once have appeared as a gothic representation of madness, now raises difficult questions about race, colonialism, gender and confinement.<\/p>\n Even without having read Jean Rhys\u2019s Wide Sargasso Sea<\/a> (1966) or the seminal feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic<\/a> (1979), modern audiences approach Bertha with a different understanding of colonial history than that of Bront\u00eb\u2019s time. <\/p>\n However, the answer is not to erase Bertha as a gothic force, which this production does. At one point we even see Bertha carrying a doll. If directors John Caird and Megan McGinnis choose to depict her as a childish innocent our sympathies must lie with her \u2013 but this sympathy goes nowhere and she is still removed as an obstacle to the romantic plot.<\/p>\n Jane Eyre is so rich in imagery and intricate plot that three hours can never do it justice. However, more could have been done in this production.<\/p>\n The musical offers a touching love story and a moving tale of a young woman\u2019s struggles. Yet the novel\u2019s much darker narrative is absent. Bront\u00eb creates this shadow narrative through gothic elements including dreams, Bessie\u2019s local folklore and folk song, premonitions and monstrous night visitations, mysterious voices and uncanny laughter. A reference to Bessie\u2019s folksong about the \u201corphan child\u201d crossing the cold moors could have enriched the music.<\/p>\n Most crucially, Bront\u00eb mirrors Bertha and Jane throughout the novel, but this mirroring is largely absent from the production. That is particularly striking because of the set\u2019s prominent bird imagery. A plinth around three sides of the stage bears Jane\u2019s declaration to Rochester: \u201cI am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.\u201d<\/p>\n Bird imagery is rife throughout the novel. It is often associated with wildness, rebellion and pain. Jane makes her declaration after Rochester likens her to \u201ca wild, frantic bird\u201d. Bertha, too, is associated with birds and their wildness. Her confinement culminates in her escape through fire and flight from Thornfield\u2019s roof.<\/p>\n The production\u2019s confused portrayal of Bertha leaves little room for this gothic threat. Yet the novel repeatedly uses images of wildness and savagery to align the two women. These connections matter, particularly when Bertha\u2019s role is so heavily downplayed. <\/p>\n The musical misses the alignment of the two women. In Sweet Liberty, Jane (played beautifully by Charlie Burn) sings of \u201cboundless skies\u201d and declares: \u201cI will fly.\u201d Yet there is no reference to Bertha, the woman literally confined at Thornfield who ultimately flies from its roof. Bertha has no voice, and she certainly does not get a song.<\/p>\nThe adaptation<\/h2>\n
The shadow narrative<\/h2>\n
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