Guest Blog: Nick Lane On Adapting JANE EYRE For Stage

For me, it's always the same: I'm asked to adapt a novel, I get all excited, have all these ideas... Then I read the source material and think, "Wow. Follow that."

So it was here. Jane Eyre was the first time I'd been asked to adapt a novel by a female writer. I was honoured... and nervous. I knew the book; I'd read it when I was younger, purely for pleasure.

Coming to it as a playwright was entirely different, I'd say - you're looking for ways to weave a satisfying theatrical structure as seamlessly as possible into a beautiful, revered text without losing the quality of the character work or the richness of the world created within its pages.

Throughout the novel Jane conquers hardships and heartbreaks with wit, grace, strength and an indomitable spirit. Her self-determining nature, which continues to inspire, must have been close to revolutionary at the time.

This is why the book retains its importance, I think. Here's a character who society believes to be inferior from the moment she draws breath by dint of her gender. And yet, through all she has to endure, she stands constantly in front of the world and says, "All of my choices will be mine alone". Is there anyone who wouldn't be inspired by that?

No one who knows the novel needs me to tell them what a genius Charlotte Brontë was. The way she captures the ache of love - not just the pure power of first love, as it is with Jane, but the desperate inner chaos of Rochester's heart as he wrestles with his own feelings and his dark secret past - is unsurpassable. Add to that social commentary, wit, a wealth of sympathetic and detestable characters, an almost Gothic sense of unease...

Follow that, indeed.

I always start by exploring structure. It's a long novel; to do it justice in a two-hour play, you need to find a way to convey the world Brontë offers the reader without verbally overwhelming an audience. Once the structure's in place, it's about deciding how the story you're telling is to be told.

In this, I was grateful to Adrian (McDougall, director of the production and Artistic Director of Blackeyed Theatre) for being a sounding board as I worked some of the more dreadful ideas out of my system. Adrian gave me a steer as to the style he wanted to employ and how many actors I had to play with, and I found a way to make that work within the story.

Then... we get into making Jane.

It's almost certainly my own insecurities feeding this, but never have I been more conscious in my professional life of being male than when I first started to put the title character onto the page. I was acutely aware of the importance of getting her right.

Fortunately, I had an ace up my sleeve here too - a good friend of mine, Tabitha, who, I'm delighted to say, is not only an extremely smart woman (far smarter than me) but also knows Jane Eyre inside and out. My mantra became 'If I can make Tab believe in Jane, I'm definitely on the right track!'.

I'm not really sure how much more I want to say for fear of giving anything away. I can tell you it's an actor-musician show. I can say that some of the ideas Adrian has had for moving the novel from moment to moment physically are quite beautiful, and that I reckon - fingers crossed - we'll have done Charlotte proud.

Find full tour date and venues for Jane Eyre here

Photo credit: Alex Harvey-Brown,

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