Review: JANE EYRE, Southwark Playhouse Elephant

With the Wuthering Heights film adaptation this February, critics everywhere saw how easy it is to strip the Brontë sisters’ particular brand of Gothic novel down to its bare essentials, and lose everything of substance along the way. This musical version of Jane Eyre fares slightly better, but still makes a complex novel a hollow shell of itself.

Paul Gordon and John Caird’s Tony-nominated musical, which makes its UK premiere, seems to recognise Charlotte Brontë’s final novel as primarily a Bildungsroman. We meet Jane as an abused orphan (played initially by talented young performer Emily-Rose Samuel, who does much of the heavy lifting establishing her character’s emotional foundations), and follow her through to an adulthood shaped by frustrated ambition and romantic repression.

Gordon and Caird’s lyrics pay lip service to Jane’s longing for freedom, her evolving religious faith, and the ways in which her love for the enigmatic Mr Rochester challenges her. But too often these themes are explained to us didactically, or expressed in generic terms (Jane sings at one point of wishing to “go where I am not allowed”, a strangely childish plea). The eventual conclusion, involving Jane’s matured love for Rochester, is a trite romantic comedy ending rather than a spiritual reckoning.

This is not helped by some odd pacing choices: the first act ends on a forgettable duet between Jane and Rochester, which offers no real plot advancement and causes an awkward break in momentum. Jane and Rochester’s wedding, interrupted by the revelation that he’s already married, only comes about two-thirds of the way through the show, leaving Jane’s emotional journey to stall at the start of the second act.

What Gordon and Caird have succeeded, though, is in creating a capital-R Romantic, almost operatic emotional world for their characters. Their best writing is that which embraces the natural lyricism in Charlotte Brontë’s writing; famous images from the novel, including the string tying Jane and Rochester together, feel made for song. Elsewhere, if the lyrics fall short, the accompanying soundscape builds back the story’s emotional force, tapping into Jane’s sense of fear, isolation or passion at any given moment.

Meanwhile, Charlie Burn and Ashley Gilmour as Jane and Rochester portray their characters’ relationship with an appealing focus on self-realisation, the idea that the pair know themselves better on account of knowing each other. Their initial chance meeting out in the hills is played for laughs, in a baffling scene that makes their ensuing bond a little hard to believe, but the performers later rescue this with their powerful, psychologically rooted chemistry. They give consistently emotive vocal performances, too.

The direction, by Caird and Megan McGinnis, elegantly balances intimate character work with a sleek ensemble who perform much of Jane’s first-person narration – an interplay between Jane’s interior and exterior life that perhaps echoes Caird’s background as an opera director. Morgan Large’s design dials into the Gothic without slipping into Halloween cliches, with a monochrome palette, and additional costume items hung on the walls like corpses.

The show’s tinges of horror, of course, culminate in Rochester’s former wife Bertha, the original madwoman in the attic. Hannah Lindsey is a suitably haunting, pathos-inducing presence in a tattered wedding dress (though the decision to cast a white actor for this Caribbean-born character is an oversight on a par with Jacob Elordi playing Heathcliff).

This production is not the intellectual powerhouse fans of the novel may come to expect, but it does not hold back when it comes to heightened, moving displays of emotion – obeying not the letter of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece, but certainly its spirit.

Jane Eyre plays at Southwark Playhouse Elephant until 24 October

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