Jane Eyre (RNT)

Yes, still here, being department chair from my house.  

The Royal National Theatre is one of many arts organizations uploading streaming content, and given that I'm teaching a "revisions of Jane Eyre" seminar this semester, I was intrigued to see that their Jane Eyre (a collaboration with the Bristol Old Vic) was one of the plays on the agenda.  In terms of plot, the adaptation sticks closely to the original text, although there are some striking thematic deviations (and the occasional omission) that I'll discuss below.  All of the action takes place on a single abstract and geometrical set, mounted by ramps and ladders, and the musical accompaniment ranges from traditional to twentieth century (the careful listener will hear Rochester's courtship song floating by).  The costumes tend to the sparse, with the crimson-gowned Bertha Mason the best-dressed of all. This is not, in other words, a "period piece," but rather an explicitly modernized resetting of the novel that has recursively adopted some later critiques of it--for example, by making Bertha Mason into the play's Greek Chorus and casting an Afro-Caribbean actress in the role, and by validating Jane's anger instead of demanding that she moderate it.  (This Jane yells quite a bit.)  

There are two key revisions to the original that I'd like to discuss.  The first--and who can be shocked, given the blog you're reading--is the adaptation's attempt to secularize the novel.  Bronte's Jane Eyre certainly criticizes hypocrites (Brocklehurst, Mrs. Reed) and Calvinists (St. John Rivers), along with wannabe Catholics (Eliza Reed), but it's still an emphatically Christian novel: Jane-the-retrospective-writer criticizes Phase One of her passion for Rochester not just because it's mistaken, but, more importantly, because it's actually sinful ("I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol" [ch. 24]); similarly, Mr. Rochester needs to undergo a full conversion experience before he can become a suitable romantic partner.  Here, Jane's faith seems much more ambiguous and much less operational.  The play abrogates nearly all of Jane's moral jousting with Rochester, thereby erasing most of their key differences when it comes to the meaning of conscience.  Without those discussions, it's harder to see why both Jane's refusal to be Rochester's mistress and her willingness to flout convention by going to India as St. John's sister, not his wife, emerge from exactly the same principle.  Although Helen Burns seems comforted by her faith, the play mostly associates Christianity with abuse (Brocklehurst) and repression (St. John); Jane's grim outburst that God is a "loving tyrant," during her talk with a (strangely middle-aged?) Diana Rivers, is not really moderated by anything else.   Very noticeably, Mr. Rochester undergoes no conversion experience at all, and finishes the play with all limbs intact instead of experiencing Bronte's blunt-force Biblical symbolism; the character spends a good chunk of the play being gruff and kind of a jerk (although, oddly, nowhere near as manipulative as the original), but is apparently not in need of a redemption arc.  Even his marriage proposal is nowhere near as obnoxious, and unaccompanied by divine symbolism in the form of blasted trees.

Secularizing the text, though, is a common choice.  More unusual is the decision to strip Jane of her inheritance--and, for that matter, of the rest of her family, as she isn't related to the Riverses here.  (I suspect someone got a little unhappy about the whole "cousin proposing marriage" thing.) It's genuinely difficult to figure out just how far the politics of this move extend, since while Jane Eyre is set entirely prior to Britain's emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean, the adaptation's adult action is set afterwards (we know this because Jane reads from Dickens' Pickwick Papers in Act II).  While the casting of Bertha Mason points directly to the origins of Rochester's money (a sugar plantation) and, indirectly, Jane's (her uncle was a wine merchant in Madeira), the adaptation doesn't actually do anything with the point.  For it to register, viewers have to understand the novel's chronology (anecdotally, most readers think the book is set at the time Bronte wrote it) and remember, or even know, when Pickwick was published (which, doubtful).  So I think we have to assume that the choice sticks at the personal level, in which Jane maintains her agency by never entering into the more fairy-tale-esque habits of the original novel's plot.  There is no deus ex machina to reward her with the portable property necessary to hold her own against Rochester's wealth; instead, Jane does it entirely on her own gumption.  At the same time, stripping her of all connection to the (shrunken) Rivers family also means erasing her longing for relations and relating.  In the novel, the three Rivers siblings parallel and compensate for Jane's other cousins, the abusive Reeds.  But in the play, there will be no additional family outside of the one that Jane and Rochester make for themselves.  One gets the sense that nobody quite knew what to do with the Rivers family or the denouement, as this is the weakest (and hastily concluded) chunk of the play; St. John never really works as Rochester's counterpart, and the missing inheritance dissipates much of the force of Jane's time with them.  

Comments

[ROGER ALLEN]

" while Jane Eyre is set entirely prior to Britain's emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean, the adaptation's adult action is set afterwards (we know this because Jane reads from Dickens' Pickwick Papers in Act II)."
Does Jane reveal the Papers' publication date? If not, I think you're probably over-rating the knowledge of literary history - and history perhaps - expected of the play's audience; quite possibly the adapters' knowledge, too. Pickwick, I think, may be chosen just to date the play as unspecifically in the early nineteenth century if settins and costumes give no guidance.