JANE EYRE London Coliseum

Charlotte Bronte’s heady mixture of romantic melodrama and Gothic horror was based on her own passions, dreams, frustrations and rebellion against a lonely and monotonous life. The novel was published in 1847 and staged soon after. There have been at least eleven films, one with Orson Welles, two musicals, two operas, and a highly imaginative production by Polly Teale for Shared Experience. And now there is a dance drama by Patrick de Bena for Shanghai Ballet, which updates the action to the late Victorian era and ignores completely Jane’s miserable childhood in her aunt’s home and at school and begins with her arrival as governess at Thornfield Hall, the home of Edward Rochester.
Jane (Xiang Jieyan) dances a secondary role to Bertha, the mad woman in the attic, the first wife of Rochester, who sets his bedroom ablaze whilst he sleeps. Half-Creole, half-English, she was raised in Jamaica. De Bena is not the first to put her centre stage. Jean Rhys did so in her prequel novel, Wide Sargossa Sea. Fan Xiaofeng’s Bertha, does not come across as the malignant, violent, depraved wild animal, Bronte describes. Similarly, Wu Husheng is far too boyish to be the middle-aged, dark, commanding, ugly, brooding Rochester. What we see on stage bears little relation to the characters in the novel, who end up here stripping to their underwear and marching down to the footlights. Nothing erotic; it is, evidently, meant to signify they are now angels. The dramatic high spot is the male corps as the flames of the conflagration.