Jane Eyre at Mercury Theatre and on tour – review

A dark and brooding melodrama with visually sumptuous set pieces that send a shiver through your spine seems the perfect way to spend a dismal, autumnal night. Colchester’s Mercury Theatre has come up with a stunning revival of Sally Cookson and Mike Aker’s take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Award-winning director Lily Dyble delivers a feast for the senses with a physical and pared-back production that pulls no punches.

I have to say that Jane Eyre isn’t the jolliest of the great classic novels. In fact, it’s hard to find a single moment of brightness in a story of unrelenting misery. But, goodness, this muscular retelling of the Original Company’s 2014 production makes the heart pump faster as we see the heroine battling almost insurmountable odds to find a second’s happiness in her unbelievably tragic life.

This revival – co-produced by the Mercury, Rose Theatre Kingston, Storyhouse Chester and Northern Stage in Newcastle – brings back one of literature’s great anti-heroes, Edward Rochester. Gabriel Akuwudike’s tall, superbly glowering, Byronic protagonist is very effective. Amongst all the angst and emotion being played out by the women in his life, he delivers a maelstrom of internal anguish and turmoil with a quiet, understated performance.

His Rochester is tortured, deceitful and brooding. It’s hard to know if we should be rooting for him or not, when we become aware of the dark secrets he hides. In modern terms it’s likely he would be pegged as a rogue and scoundrel but perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. There’s a lot going on in his life.

He is almost engaged to a woman he doesn’t love, he has an explosive secret in the attic and a mysterious young French ward. Things become even more complicated when he stumbles upon a slip of a girl whose life had been as unbearably awful as his own.

Unfortunately, Jane Eyre had neither parents nor fortune growing up. She was bullied and tortured under the care of hateful relatives; incurred the wrath of God from a sadistic priest at a school for charity cases and watched her best friend die in her arms. It’s a miracle she ever escaped the hellholes that marked her upbringing and her eventual quest for freedom and liberty brings her to Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall.

Olivia Marcus shines in the titular role, growing from a terrified but plucky ten-year-old into a confident, but frequently tongue-tied young woman. It is an outstanding and very emotional performance.

Also taking centre stage is Anna Yates’s huge and foreboding set of black bleachers bedecked with speakers. I’m not sure it entirely works, but it’s different. Generally, the stage is very dimly lit and, at times, it’s difficult to see what is happening. It is also often challenging to hear the dialogue delivered by some of the cast members over the background music.

Nevertheless, this Jane Eyre is an ambitious and gutsy reinvention of a period romance that has historically been bogged down by tradition and storytelling.