Shared Experience’s Eyre Gets West End PremiereDate: 25 January 2006
Shared Experience’s stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s literary classic Jane Eyre will transfer to the West End’s Trafalgar Studio 1 for a limited six-week run from 12 May 2006, following its current UK regional tour.
Jane Eyre - adapted and directed by Shared Experience joint artistic director Polly Teale from Brontë’s novel - had a successful run at the Young Vic in 1997 and has toured the UK extensively. Its latest eight-stop tour kicks off from Richmond Theatre on 2 February 2006. The play focuses on the stark contrast between Jane’s strict Victorian upbringing and her passionate, imaginative nature. Monica Dolan reprises her performance in the title role, alongside James Clyde as Mr Rochester and Miriam Acharki as Bertha Rochester.
Shared Experience's last production in the West End was in 2003 with the award-winning After Mrs Rochester, Teale’s own play based on the life of Jean Rhys who found her literary success with 1966’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which gave full scope to Bertha, aka the "madwoman in the attic" in Jane Eyre. This past autumn, the company toured Bronte, another new play written and directed by Teale, which explored the relationship between Charlotte Brontë and her novelist sisters Emily and Anne (See News, 8 Jun 2005).
The multi-award-winning touring company is renowned for its innovative work, in particular its style of embracing new writing (often using devised scripts) and new literary adaptations then combining these with physical theatre. Shared Experience’s other productions include A Passage to India, The Magic Toyshop, Anna Karenina and Mill on the Floss, which had a West End season at the Ambassadors Theatre in 2001.
Director Teale said: "It’s hugely thrilling to return to this, the first in my Brontë trilogy, after such an extraordinary journey. I am constantly astonished by the depth and complexity of this mythic tale. Returning to it with the ‘original’ Jane and Rochester nine years on has been revalatory."
Currently in Trafalgar Studio 1 is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Gunpowder Season featuring four rarely performed Jacobean and Elizabethan plays - Thomas More, A New Way to Please You, Believe What You Will and Sejanus - His Fall - as well as the world premiere of Irish playwright Frank McGuinness’ new related political drama Speaking Like Magpies (See News, 26 Aug 2005).
The RSC schedule concludes on 25 February 2006 and is followed by a limited season of English Touring Theatre’s revival of Alan Bennett’s The Old Country (See News, 5 Jan 2005). Directed by ETT artistic director Stephen Unwin, it stars Timothy West and runs from 20 March to 16 May 2006 (previews from 13 March) at Trafalgar Studios, following its own regional tour.
- by Caroline Ansdell & Terri Paddock
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