and a bit with a dog: Jane Eyre, NTLive encore

If you’re familiar with the novel, Bristol Old Vic’s stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, in its planed-down, single-night National Theatre version, is a fairly effective representation as representations go. Director Sally Cookson’s staging makes excellent use of minimal resources: a unit set with ramp, platform, and ladders; sundry props; a small cast who mostly rotate characters (all except Jane and Bertha); and a smaller band (piano, percussion, double bass, miscellaneous other things) that supplies a beautifully atmospheric soundscape for events to unfold against.

And it’s an impressive job, given that much of it emerged from the actors improvising on a framework of scenes, anchored by Charlotte Brontë’s written dialogue for key moments. So we get most of the really iconic exchanges intact, along with a few deft shortcuts. (We also get a few extras, among them Rochester, having been thrown from his horse, employing the language most of us would use nowadays under similar circumstances.)

Perhaps the most effective addition is an expanded role for Bertha Mason (Melanie Marshall, voice of gold), an almost continual presence in the form of a woman in a red dress, singing a vocal line that weaves in and out of the action, through trad song, popular song (an anachronistic but fitting Mad About the Boy), and elsewhere, as she drifts through the scenes of other people’s lives and occasionally lights a match. Because she is always there, and because of what she sings, it draws a heavier line of relationship between her and Jane than the book affords.

Also of note: Jane’s portable psychological chorus, which coalesces from the cast at Jane’s moments of uncertainty, agree or disagree with her and each other, and pay attention to things she can’t be seen to be paying attention to.

Also, evil Mr. Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards) reincarnating as Pilot the dog is a bit of inspired leveling-up.



Now for the quibbling. C’mon, you knew there would be some.

Madeleine Worrall’s Jane and Felix Hayes’s Rochester are good but ultimately a bit samey. Worrall in particular, whose character has the longest distance to travel both mentally and physically, plays a Jane who exists on a knife edge, the same at Gateshead and Lowood as at Thornfield, and it shows in her face all the time, like she’s ready to explode any second. But the character that Brontë wrote, by the time she gets to Thornfield, has mastered inscrutability, the end result of years of abuse and privation and endurance being a dense carapace of equanimity. It may be she’s ready to explode at any second, but we shouldn’t be able to tell, and neither, necessarily, should she.

Likewise Felix Hayes’s Rochester is all bluster, which makes him a bit predictable after a while, in a shouty monolithic kind of way. It’s the kind of Rochester that equates physically dangerous with interesting, when what should be interesting (and dangerous) about him is his unpredictability.

Not surprisingly, it’s the Moor House episode that suffers the most from cuts. For one thing, we lose a Rivers sister. The result of this is we get one sister, Diana (Simone Saunders, also Bessie and Blanche Ingram), devoid of background and thus existing only to be cardboard cheerleader to brother St John (Laura Elphinstone, also Helen Burns, Grace Poole, and Adele), rather than two sisters working in the governess trade, spending vacation back at the old homestead, and reading scurrilous German literature to each other when St Bro is not at home. (I know that few people on Planet Anglo get why this is funny, or the point Brontë was ostensibly trying to make with it, but it’s the undercurrent that keeps us out of the shallows, people.)

Beyond that, enough additional material is cut – what St John is giving up to go to India, for instance -- that we don’t really get much sense of why Jane would entertain St John’s proposal for more than a split nanosecond, or (disembodied voices notwithstanding) how the heat of those personal crises would propel her back to Thornfield.

Once she is back there, amid the broken wooden frames and with black ash falling all around, things get very thumbnail, to the point where I’m not sure anyone unfamiliar with the story would quite understand what had happened. But at the end of three and a half hours, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to finish things off with a few broad brush strokes, and they do it, ending where they began, with a certain calligraphic elegance.

The fur-lined bathtubs of moral rectitude

Mark Lawson's analysis of why 19th century novels (a select few, anyway) make attractive options for tv and movie producers may be found here. It's an interesting read if you've been wondering why the Austen / Dickens / Brontë juggernaut seems to roll along with only an occasional veering off into the odd siding.  His chief argument comes at the end:

At their simplest level, each of these books features a couple whose union is impossible or dangerous: Cathy and Heathcliff face the bar of class and propriety, Anna and Vronsky challenge the adultery taboo, and Pip and Estella are thwarted not only by their starkly different social backgrounds but by her bizarre guardian... Fiction is driven by friction and taboo but, in most parts of contemporary society, we have created a society in which there are few obstacles to people doing what they want or being with the person they desire.

In other words, we've torn down the walls so convenient for characters to smash into, so contemporary life isn't interesting enough. Which is to say modern moral ambivalence makes for bad television.

It's arguable, I suppose, to a point.  Really what he means is we like straw men to tilt at, particularly in these troubled times.  It is, after all, excellent fun catharsis to watch people -- particularly women in corsets -- be persecuted for loving the wrong people, and yet how pleasing it is to think that it could never happen in this day and age. Or at least not in those clothes.

Update: Meanwhile, over at The Independent, D J Taylor wonders why we're still taking the 19th century's phone calls.

"Beige"

So when we alerted our Special Envoy to the Court of King Festus that we were going to see the latest Jane Eyre flick, the reply we received was "Beige."  Anyone might be forgiven for thinking that was code (wikileaks take note), but no, in fact it was a thoroughly accurate assessment.  And as I was watching the film, and all those endless shots of Landscape, or People Observing Landscape, or People in the Landscape Observing the Landscape, I was trying not to laugh, because our Ministry of Elsewhere has a zero tolerance policy for shallow pretense masquerading as art, and I was imagining our Envoy sitting through this movie while gnashing her popcorn in an ever-increasing state of irritation, wishing for an Eddie Izzard-style Room with a View OF HELL!! scenario which, sadly, would never come to pass.

Though no doubt it was not only the ponderous passage-of-time, nothing-ever-happens-here-oh-yeah-except-for-the-thing-in-the-attic overkill, but also the acting...the script...the general anemia of the enterprise. Really, if you're going to pay Judi Dench the fee she probably now commands, give her something to do, and not less than is in the book. It isn't like your screenwriter has to invent stuff out of whole cloth, it's all right there.  And Michael Fassbender, though no doubt interesting to look at -- they seem to have done a fabulous embalming job, but seriously, people, that's not what the story is about, and if you are making Jane Eyre vs the Zombie, well, use a real zombie, they emote better. And if you're going to cut so liberally -- no torn veil? none of Mrs. Fairfax's serious misgivings? and chez Rivers, though being given pride of place in the re-worked narrative order, barely a blip on the radar, because all the scenes are left out that explain who those people are -- if you're going to leave all that out, it should be a shorter movie.  Or at least not feel like you're living through it in real time, watching the grass grow like all the other inmates.

Nice lawn, though.

lost Mayan calendar reckons time according to film adaptations of Jane Eyre

Update 12/12/12: If you've landed here because it's the week before the end is nigh, allow us to direct you to the Dresden Codex and the wiki that will attempt to explain the math. Good luck.

Another flick version fades into obscurity -- was it the one with Toby Stephens? Who can ever remember? -- as a new clone takes its place. The NYT reports here.  The money quote from screenwriter Moira Buffini:

Jane spends a whole year [chez Rivers], agonized with longing, and that’s when she begins to see what the alternative to Rochester is: a loveless marriage or spinsterhood.

But I always thought the best part of JE was what the apparently off-putting, spinstery Rivers sisters are reading when pious, straight-laced brother St John is not home, and how Brontë reveals it through an untranslated, unattributed, and very selective quotation.  lmao, as they say in the common parlance.  

Will this detail ever make it into a movie version? Hell no.  And this isn't what affects the gender politics of the piece -- that's always up to the screenwriter and director to emphasize or bury under the novel's own Sturm und Drang. But, for all its obscurity of reference (and it was probably obscure enough in Brontë's time that to get it you had either to be hanging out with shady disreputable Carlyle types or be a governess who could teach German), it's the true subversive element of the novel, sitting there contentedly in its spinsterhood, waiting for the world to change around it. 1848 is coming.




Update: Okay, forget the wiki link.  For an astute analysis of the life of Die Räuber in England during the Napoleonic era, this is the place.  (I would only suggest two alterations, apart from fixing the typos: first, that there is a difference between "carousing with" nuns and raping them. (Seriously, Professor, I'm just going to assume that English isn't your primary language.)  Second, that Goethe and Schiller are spinning in their graves at being mentioned in the same sentence with Kotzebue, that traitorous hack. But never mind. He's no doubt burning in Hell by now.)