Rochester rescued by his stern and steely Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre (Blackeyedtheatre.co.uk) Verdict: Trusty literary classic ★★★★✩ Rent (Hopemilltheatre.co.uk) Verdict: Put your mortgage on it ★★★★✩
JANE EYRE is one of the hardest working heroines in all of Victorian literature. She’s a cast-iron steam engine of a character who really puts in the hours, shuttling from stage to screen and back again, in countless adaptations.
And here she is again, in a new stage version of Charlotte Bronte’s classic 19th- century novel, from Bracknell’s estimable Blackeyed Theatre company (filmed on stage the day before Lockdown II began).
One benefit of Nick Lane’s deft and pacy retelling is that it clocks in at under two hours. Nor did I feel there was much missing from the life of hardy orphan Jane, who toughs out childhood neglect, shrugs off school-room bullying — and eventually finds love and independence on her own uncompromising terms. One-part nightmare (like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) and one-part Mills & Boon romance, her story is never less than a rollicking ride.
So it is again in Adrian McDougall’s taut production that matches the story’s grim northern ways with sometimes impenetrable gothic lighting and a tumbledown, barn-like set.
An upright piano threatens to add the musical austerity of a Methodist church hall, but the Victorian melodrama is instead borne along on the fast-flowing currents of composer George Jennings’s lush, rippling Rachmaninov-style score.
Some of the characters are a little cartoonish — snarling aunts, pompous pastors and wholesomely doting friends. But despite bustling about i n a businesslike grey tartan dress, Kelsey Short’s Jane provides a still, stern and steely centre.
THIS is a woman who says she means to dodge Hell ‘by not dying’, and I’d have liked to see her let her hair down a little more. Luckily, as her beloved Rochester, Ben Warwick is a sufficiently roguish, desirable and inscrutable alpha male who adds a little sauce to the saga.
THERE’S no way Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre can have expected to distil all the raw theatrical energy of Jonathan Larson’s rock opera Rent inside a mere television set.
This is a show that really needs to be seen live and unplugged. But to their credit, the feisty young cast practically demolished my telly trying.
Filmed with a company of 12 actors — and a live audience before lockdown — the plan was always to make the show available online, too. But from tonight, that’s happening by default.
And the good news is that it’s a glorious record of a rapturous musical about grungy New Yorkers living in a 1990s squat and dealing with the trials of work, love and poverty in the still long shadow of Aids.
Based loosely on Puccini’s La Boheme, the show became a cult hit, but Larson did not have long to bathe in the limelight — sadly, he died from a heart condition the night before it opened Off Broadway in 1996.
His songs, however; including Rent, La Vie Boheme and, most f amously, Seasons Of Love (‘525,600 minutes’), which range from rock to soul to gospel to calypso, have become classics,
Luke Sheppard’s set looks like a Manhattan loft transformed into a cabaret club for the characters to do their turns.
Maiya Quansah-Breed sizzles as a raunchy junkie — the modern equivalent of Puccini’s Mimi — while Tom Francis, as her songwriter boyfriend, is a floppy-haired hunk with a Bon Jovi-ish howl. And Alex Thomas-Smith lives up to his name — Angel — as the squatters’ spiritual guardian, resplendent in a tutu, pink wig and glitter lipstick.
It’s not always easy to keep up with them all, but this is as fine a production of the show as you’ll find. I suspect we’ve not seen the last of it.