Live Wire and Roughhouse Theatre's travelling, one-woman adaptation of Jane Eyre is a perfectly serviceable introduction to one of the greatest, most well-known (and most frequently adapted) novels of all time. But it's not an 'inventive exploration of the status of women in society', as the publicity claims. It's more like a frenetic, 80-minute episode of Jackanory.
Alison Campbell plays all the parts with charm and dedication. In fact, the next time an audiobook of Jane Eyre is being recorded, she would do a fantastic job. The only trouble is that, unlike the book, the show itself feels depressingly short on original ideas, theatrical inventiveness or deep insight into the text.
Minor characters like Mrs Fairfax, St John Rivers and his two sisters become northern stereotypes rather than rounded individuals. Campbell pushes a luggage trunk around the stage to create different scenes, but each of them simply looks like a luggage trunk from a slightly different angle. The thrilling scene where Jane rescues Rochester from a burning bedroom doesn't catch fire. It all feels much more related and narrated than experienced and shown.
At the same time, there are definitely some interesting ideas in this show. Simply having it performed by one woman is a fitting homage to Brontë's original (whose full title is Jane Eyre: an Autobiography). That single-person perspective underlines the spirit of independence that the book fearlessly heralds. There's a flexing of fractured narrative too, with the early scenes of child abuse at home and at school knitted into the later events to give a sense of comparison. Most noticeably, the entire play unfolds to an almost constant soundtrack of drumming.
The drumming may be there to give a feel of urgency, a whiff of modernity, even a soupçon of style. But in practice it becomes almost maddeningly unbearable, like trying to read, oh I don't know, your favourite Victorian novel while someone sits next to you, drumming the whole time. After-a-rat-tat-while-tapatapa-you-just-tippety-tap-tap-want-to-click-tap-shout-rap-tap-PLEASESTOPTHEFUCKINGDRUMMING.
Also, for a 'Best of Jane Eyre' compilation, even at under an hour and a half, there are some shocking omissions. How could playwright Dougie Blaxland pass over the young Jane's sarcastic but proudly literal answer to Mr Brocklehurst's pompous question about how she intended to avoid going to Hell: 'I must keep in good health and not die.'? And why include Jane's eventual wealth, but exclude her final meeting with her evil stepmother Mrs Reed, the key moment in the story when she realises that the horrors of her childhood no longer hold any power over her? And why pass over the metafictional climax of the entire novel, 'Reader, I married him', where Brontë breaks the fourth wall in a blaze of feminist self-confidence, without taking it as a challenge to do something equally eye-popping on stage? Drama is about moments. And these are missed moments.
The programme explains why 2025 is an important time to revisit Jane Eyre. It marks 200 years since Charlotte Brontë's older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of consumption within weeks of each other at just ten and eleven years old respectively. There seems little doubt that their loss was a profound inspiration behind the novel, particularly the heartbreaking and foundational death of Helen Burns (a scene which is handled with tender sincerity in the production). It's a historical factoid, and it's only in the programme, but it is a powerful insight nonetheless, and gives a glimpse of the sort of fresh perspective that didn't quite make it into the show.
Jane Eyre has been a petri dish for creative exploration over the decades. Think of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea for one. Roughhouse have settled for a basic retelling with a flicker of fringe theatricals. Reader, I want more.