![]() ![]() ![]() Sometimes men will be called upon to fight but rather than really fight, actors may say the word SLAP loudly to intimate that contact has been made. For example, at word of a birth, an actor may say, ‘it’s a girl’, and find their words repeated by every actor on the stage to suggest that word of the birth has got about. The theatre is often a place that requires actors to represent rather than directly show. Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. Perhaps we need to use the words of Charlotte Brontë to address the problems we had with the production, though: By the interval it was clear that a great many people liked what they were seeing. The company take liberties with the novel, to be sure, with Mr Rochester dropping an F bomb when he falls from his horse (despite the lack of an actual horse, actor Tim Delap hanging from the wooden climbing frame set and pretending to gallop like a demon through a hellfire rain), Melanie Marshall belting out versions of Dinah Washington’s Mad about the Boy and Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy to hammer home certain resonant parts of the book, Paul Mundell bounding about the set in the character of Rochester’s dog Pilot…there are times when these devices seem devised merely to show off an idea someone had. ![]() This feels like an adaptation where the company had money to spare and wracked their very souls as to how to get it spent.Īnd that – that engine of complicity, the company sitting together, interrogating the book, transposing details, transforming the written word into theatrical action – spills over into the whole. This feels like an adaptation that has not had to scrimp. Let us talk about money, for this is a play that drips money from the rafters, with shirts that descend from the ceiling and windows that descend from the ceiling and red lights that transform the entire stage into blood at a moment’s notice (and just for a moment, mind). If director Sally Cookson’s production has a heart, it is Clifford. Then, let us talk of Jane: Nadia Clifford is on stage for the entirety of the play’s length and she is tremendous, showing us Jane as a child and Jane as a woman with only a change of clothes to help her. Then add a trio of musicians who could easily be Mumford and Sons with their white shirts and waistcoats, providing busy incidental backing and the occasional song (in the style of The Decemberists). Let us talk about what the crowds appeared to like first, shall we? First, the set: imagine a climbing frame handcrafted by gilded craftsmen within a walled community for the richest children in the land, providing the company with many levels from which to work. What was this wonder, this marvel, so entrancing the many at the Lowry on 12 April? An adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, no less, 170 years old this year and, as the crowds indicate, as much of a draw today as it was then. The whole – so lavish, so sumptuous, such a modern, innovative reworking of the classic novel. Sally Cookson The Lowry, April 12 2017.Īh how audacious, the audience clucked in the interval. ![]()
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