Jane Eyre is 125 minutes of bodice-ripping 19th Century romantic drama from a cast of 8 (5F, 3M): Act One 75 mins, 15-minute interval, Act Two 50 mins.

There are two sides to 12 year-old orphan Jane Eyre (Lucy Le Messurier), put into the foster-care of awful Mrs Reed (Charlotte Workman). One is demure Jane, in control of life and her emotions. The other (Bethany Audley) is a wild, fun-loving girl, full of enormous emotions moving towards hysteria and extreme vengeance. The two parts of Jane's personality love each other's company, tease and enjoy the other, while being their separate selves. When wild Jane makes Jane savagely bite loathsome, condescending son-of-the-house John Reed (David Dimitriou), Jane is punished by being locked away in her attic room. There, demure Jane wrestles with, almost strangles to death, and breaks free of, wild Jane - leaving her behind in the room when Jane is released. The two people of Jane remain physically separate for most of the play, but the mental relationship is there, and controlled Jane's emotions are portrayed on stage by the actions of the woman who remains locked in the attic, and the varying intensity and colour of the stage lighting of the room.

The set is inseparable from the way the story is told - particularly that it contains a wide, sweeping stair leading in a curve to an attic room, whose wall is removed - so that its occupant can perform and be seen. The set suggests the interior of a worn stately home, with windows to the side of the stair, all styled in a slightly-unreal way. Through the play it becomes house, sunny and storm-drenched exterior, moor, market, schoolroom - by skilful lighting design and the movement of a few bench-shaped props.

Jane receives no love, and has removed the inner consolation of herself by suppression. Maid Bessie (Violet Ryder) shows a slight friendship just before Jane is sent to the iron regime of Mr Brocklehurst (Michael Linge)'s school. Her Teacher (David Dimitriou) is mild but ruled by martinet Mr Brocklehurst. Her first real friend becomes copper-haired Helen Burns (Anya-Marie Vinci), a sweet-natured girl who shows her kindness. Appallingly, the school is infected with TB, and Jane is forbidden to go to the dormitory where the sick are isolated. Risking the disease, she goes to Helen and comforts her till the child's death. Helen's rising from her bed, and walking into the light (of heaven, there is a strong religious subtext to the story) is a starkly powerful emotional event - one of several tear-bringing moments in a play that's directed (by Darren Lawrence from Polly Teale's adaptation of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)'s 1847 novel) with a full sense of the emotions which are the real characters of the story.

Jane, now 18 or so, arrives to be governess in the house of absent Mr Edward Rochester (Damian Quinn). Housekeeper Mrs Fairfax (Charlotte Workman) introduces her to Mr Rochester's young (perhaps 12-year-old) ward Adele (Anya-Marie Vinci) who she'll look after. Grace Poole (Violet Ryder) is a maid who lives in the attic room. Her task in reality is to look after a mad woman who lives in the same room, and whose existence is concealed from outsiders including Jane. Mad Bertha (Bethany Audley)'s screams and wanderings are attributed to Grace Poole. Edward Rochester arrives with his Horse (David Dimitriou), and Pilot the Dog (Michael Linge).

Pretty Adele reacts to most events with extremes of emotion - shrieks of elation, depths of distress. Rochester tells Jane that Adele may be his illegitimate child by a relationship with one of the many women he's been involved with in his visits round the world - in this case a promiscuous Parisian dancer whose love he lost. He clearly loves Adele, but finds it distressing when, he explains, she reminds him of her mother. Mad Bertha sets fire to the house. Jane doesn't see her, but wakes and puts it out. Mr Rochester flirts with Jane, and she feels her emotions involved (evoked on stage by activity in the attic - the woman there can be either Jane's other half, or the real mad woman Bertha). Richard Mason (Michael Linge) arrives from Spanish Town, Jamaica, with an accent close to the English Policeman's in 'Allo 'Allo!, and Rochester orders him not to tell Jane anything. Mad Bertha bites Richard Mason severely in the throat, but he survives. Rochester flaunts snootily dull Blanche Ingram (Violet Ryder) and her foppish dad Lord Ingram (David Dimitriou) in front of Jane, to provoke her jealousy. Edward and Jane finally agree to marry. Mad Bertha rips up the bridal veil while Jane sleeps, so Jane goes to church in just a long white dress. As the Clergyman (David Dimitriou) is about to marry them, Richard Mason announces that mad Bertha is Bertha Mason, his sister, and Edward Rochester's first wife.

Rochester agrees it's true, but says in his defence that he's looked after a maniac for years, and not deserted her. Jane Eyre runs away from Thornfield, the Rochester house, and arrives penniless in a village. Vicar St John Rivers (Michael Linge) finds her starving, and he and his sisters Diana Rivers (Violet Ryder) and Mary Rivers (Anya-Marie Vinci) take Jane, now under the name Jane Elliot so that she can't be identified, into their family. St John Rivers founds a local school in which Jane becomes the teacher. He wants her to marry him, but Jane doesn't.

Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield to find that mad Mrs Rochester No 1 has burnt it down. Jane is told that Bertha ran to the roof of the burning house. Edward Rochester ran to save her, but she leapt from the roof and died. He was blinded and had his hand crushed in the fire, and has gone to live in another of his houses, Ferndean, away in the woods with Mrs Fairfax to look after him. Jane goes to Edward, they embrace, she says she'll be with him. The end. It's a good end, too, and a real tear-jerker. It makes the point that concludes all the story lines, then stops immediately.

Bethany Audley delivers a remarkable performance as the two-characters-in-one Mrs Bertha Mason Rochester, and the emotional component of Jane Eyre's character. At times her speech is synchronised with Jane's. The two halves of Jane are finally reunited when Jane returns to the damaged Rochester - a touching and effective symbolism. Bethany Audley's main task is, vigorously, to express silent emotion in hand-tying, writhing, dancing, longing. The fact that it doesn't have the faintest dead-dull touch of that awful label physical theatre, but is on the contrary completely engaging and moving, is a tribute to her fine performance.

David Dimitriou does horrid John Reed, weak Teacher, weedy Lord Ingram, and unshockable Clergyman with a lively panache, but it's as Edward Rochester's Horse, with broom-handle for sound effects, that he excels. Michael Linge does a fine line in perverted men - his Mr Brocklehurst probably enjoys punishment unusually, his Richard Mason is a decent man with a slightly creepy undertow, his St John Rivers has an interesting complexity of good man - he rescues Jane from starvation when no-one else lifts a hand - and fractionally-insane religious zeal. His Pilot the Dog is terrific - so unlike a dog in shape (thankfully), but completely convincing. Charlotte Workman delivers the truly horrible Mrs Reed without caricature - an extreme character, but very believable in Charlotte Workman's skilled hands. She presents Mrs Fairfax with conviction, strong in beliefs and personal loyalty, but not unquestioning. Violet Ryder portrays Bessie, Grace Poole, Blanche Ingram and Diana Rivers with deep insight. The character she has most scope for fun with (from the script) is annoying Blanche, and Violet Ryder scoops out Blanche's maximum annoyance in a highly entertaining way, without cartooning her.

Anya-Marie Vinci gives a set of fine performances: as Abigail, Helen Burns, Adele, Mary Rivers. Adele is a part that threads through the story, and it must be difficult to pull off. The actor's an adult playing a child for much of the play, in which the other adult actors are presenting (apart from a few brief scenes) adult characters. Somehow Anya-Marie Vinci makes it work seamlessly. Her performance is deft, stylish, vibrant, extreme when needed, and heartwarming. There's a sense of damage in Adele - and the actor catches an inner sensitivity. Her short scenes as Helen Burns are remarkably moving; she catches with a few lines of dialogue and a couple of very short scenes an essence of goodness in the character, and allows it to exude.

Damian Quinn's Edward Rochester is a strikingly handsome man. His Mr Rochester is robust, sensitive and 3-dimensional. In one level, Rochester is a travelling romantic, fornicator, adulterer. But he is a good man who has stood by his responsibilities to his daughter and wife, who eventually risks his life without thought to try and save her. To make these more than words on the page of a novel, and forge them into the illusion of a human being is a task, and Damian Quinn walks away with it. His Rochester has a natural charisma, that comes from the character's intrinsic honesty as a person. There's the slightest stumble into Eshtury speech when Mr Rochester slips out of period to say a few words like schtring for string towards the end of Act One, but if Edward Rochester sneaks away from all the mad women in his house to watch Eastenders every now and again, who's to blame him?

Polly Teale's adaptation of the novel brings out some subtly imaginative undercurrents. There's almost a suggestion from the heightened levels of Adele's behaviour that perhaps - could she be the legitimate daughter of Rochester's marriage to Bertha, explaining even more fully the mixture of love and distress she inspires in him? The pairing of Jane's emotional personality with mad Bertha is very clever - raising the questions of whether Jane is herself latently equally mad, with trouble to come; and of whether Edward Rochester is drawn to madness - above all in its visible showing of so much of Jane's character. Darren Lawrence's direction - with movement direction by André Pink - is right on the button all the way through, and its hefty emotional component is superb, producing a play firing constantly on several levels of meaning.

There's lots of imaginative staging and micro-scenes, but the one for the bin is where poor Jane has to run round the stage continually, many, many times - to the level of boredom; and surely of exhaustion for her player - to suggest running away from Thornfield. It's accompanied by some mediocre film-chase music. Walking off stage and back on again would be fine, or fading to black. As it is, it's an am-dram staging moment in a superbly-creative whole. Original music is composed by Iddon Jones, but - without too much criticism of the music itself which may in a separate context be fine - if anything the occasional musical parts detract from the overall. They feel added-on.

Lighting Design by Matt Prentice adds immensely to the production. His evocation of times of day, weather, interior and exterior are superb, and his scoring of Bertha-as-Jane's emotions by lighting feel intuitively exact - almost unnoticeable as lighting, such is the subtletly of what he's doing. There's gifted sound design by Tristan Cairns. The set - designer Dan Collins, master carpenter Laura Monk - is just fabulous - so locked into the production that it would be difficult to separate the two strands. Wardrobe for so many changing scenes must require complex planning and design for changes - it looks very good on each of the many characters - head of wardrobe is Kate Cauldwell, her assistant is Alexia Anastasiadis, and costume maker is Nina Bence. Vocal coach is Michael Hayden.

Lucy Le Messurier stands out as Jane Eyre. Her Jane wears her hair in a prim bun, a long grey dress, boots, and sometimes a plum cloak and white bonnet, with a neat and somehow distressing suitcase, evoking Jane's reluctantly self-contained world that love has been until now unable to touch. A stunningly beautiful woman, Lucy Le Messurier takes the character, and reveals her gracefully, from little girl to 19-year-old grown-up, from an unloved child to a mature adult who has understood the extent of and brought together inside herself the enormously passionate and questingly intellectual parts of her nature. Her Jane is delivered as a woman big in thought and feeling; reflective, frightened by her isolation - worried, perhaps, for her future - but determined to do what she hopes she believes are the right things. All this is evoked in a stylish, formidable performance. When this Jane gets into heightened emotion, with lots of words to say suddenly in anger to Edward, she rings less true than when moving at Jane's own natural pace. But this is more possibly the fictional character of Jane herself - surely uncomfortable, and feeling unnatural inside herself when she has to express, shrilly, tumbled-out thoughts.

At one point this Jane does probably the sexiest strip in Victorian theatre. She takes off her wedding dress onstage in a huff after Edward's attempted bigamy, for her modest grey one, to expose masses of white Victorian petticoat and bodice. Not an inch of flesh, but it gives an idea of what made all those chaps in the 19th Century so hot under their wing collars. It's probably what bent the wings. There is a quality in Lucy Le Messurier's astonishing performance that brings together and reveals Jane Eyre's complexity of feelings, imagination - and her hurricane-force sexuality, which so effectively allures mad vicar St John, and randy roving Rochester. Her Jane Eyre's final, quiet, release of her true feelings in the very last scene is a tour de force of shocking emotional power. It's almost touchable, like a gentle sigh.

CAST: (tonight) (alpha order): Bethany Audley - Bertha Mason. David Dimitriou - John Reed / Edward Rochester's Horse / Teacher / Lord Ingram / Clergyman. Lucy Le Messurier - Jane Eyre. Michael Linge - Mr Brocklehurst / Pilot the Dog / Richard Mason / St John Rivers. Damian Quinn - Edward Rochester. Violet Ryder - Bessie / Grace Poole / Blanche Ingram / Diana Rivers. Anya-Marie Vinci - Abigail / Helen Burns / Adele / Mary Rivers. Charlotte Workman - Mrs Reed / Mrs Fairfax. Note - at alternate performances, Lucy Le Messurier plays Bertha Mason, and Bethany Audley plays Jane Eyre.

COMPANY: Writer - Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855). Adapted by - Polly Teale. Director - Darren Lawrence. Original music composed by - Iddon Jones. Music performers - uncredited. Designer - Dan Collins. Lighting Designer - Matt Prentice. Sound Designer - Tristan Cairns. Stage Manager - John Blunden. Deputy Stage Manager - Julia Bermingham. Assistant Stage Manager - Emma Smith. Sound Operator - Alan Burns. Production Electrician - George Dives. Master Carpenter - Laura Monk. Rehearsal Assistant Stage Manager - Pia Jensen. Head of Wardrobe - Kate Cauldwell. Costume Maker - Nina Bence. Wardrobe Assistant - Alexia Anastasiadis. Movement Director - André Pink. Vocal Coach - Michael Hayden. Production Photos - Gemma Mount. Producer - uncredited. Company - Mountview. Thanks to: Robert Stemson, The New Players Theatre Staff.

END

John Park

reviewed Wednesday 22 August 07 / New Players Theatre

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008