`Reader, I married him": how many generations of girls have sighed contentedly over the concluding line of Charlotte Bronte's much-loved novel? With its romantic, Gothic and fairytale elements, its rollercoaster of endurance, suffering, hopes raised and dashed, its clarion call to women to live their own lives and seek love and recognition for who they are, the love story of Jane Eyre (Penny Laydon) and the Byronic hero, Rochester (Sean Murray) is full of unforgettable imagery and symbolism. Shared Experience's production is rooted in the many feminist readings of the novel and emphasises the archetypal and psychological aspects of the story. In an echo of Jean Rhys's novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester's mad wife, Bertha, is presented as Jane's emotional, sensual, alter ego, her repressed feminine self. This is beautifully portrayed in the opening sequence, in which the girls play together and read about the West Indies, but as Bertha (Harriette Ashcroft) remains visible on stage throughout the entire play, writhing and moaning whenever Jane's passionate spirit begins to stir, this device becomes extremely laboured. It also limits the potential use of Neil Warmington's superb set, a skeleton of a house, with a sweeping staircase and upper room set on wooden pillars against a delicately lit, cloud-filled sky.
Director Polly Teale and Movement Director Liz Ranken have wrapped the narrative in some very effective theatrical dressing, with lots of energetic physicality and some arresting imagery, but this is essentially a safe retelling - in an exaggerated, declamatory performance style - of the familiar story, rather than a dramatic re-imagining. Polly Teale's adaptation could have avoided the breathless gallop through acres of plot exposition by fearlessly seizing the novel by the throat and refashioning it, rather than faithfully adhering to a chronological approach.
8 p.m., until Saturday. Matinee, Saturday, 3 p.m.
