The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2020 - Issue 27

bite theatre T aken from Charlotte Brontë’s famous period novel Jane Eyre, the play first performed at the National Theatre in 2015 focuses on the title character’s life from a child to her twenties. The opening scene begins with Jane’s birth with one of the characters on the stage providing the voice of the baby crying while the others announce, “It’s a girl! It’s a girl!” The child is passed from mother to father as they walk along the set that provides the different sceneries throughout the story. Jane (Madeleine Worral) has a hard life. Her parents died of typhus when she was a younger child, her uncle Reed is the only family that was kind to her but he too passes away, and her aunt, Sarah despises the child and sees her as a troublemaker. At this stage, Jane is a plain, underfed little girl with mousey, shoulder-length hair that hasn’t seen a comb in months and a pale pinched face with curious brown eyes. She is dressed in a simple grey smock with white pantaloons, heavy black boots, and grey ankle socks. The play portrays her relationship with Bessie, the chief maid, who is fond of Jane but scolds her when the oc- casion arises; Jane’s school life at Lowood Institution and her friendship with Helen Burns who later dies of consumption; and the experiences of her adulthood as a governess where she falls in love with Mr. Rochester (Felix Hayes). One of the interesting scenes was her train journey to the school where she and a group of people ran on the spot and someone shouts out each station they pass. In her transformation from a child to an adult, her cos- tume change is done on the stage into a high-necked dress with a dark grey skirt, bodice, and paler sleeves, over which she wears a black cotton coat. Her hair is tied into a neat bun and she carries all of her belong- ings in a single brown Gladstone bag. When she makes her way to Thornfield Hall to teach a French girl called Adele, she meets the unapproachable Mr. Rochester who draws comfort from her company and with whom she falls in love. His dog, Pilot is played by a male ensemble member who slaps a thick leather cord on his thigh to suggest the dog’s ever-wagging tail and barks quite a lot. It was a bit funny seeing the man-dog at first but the actor did a fantastic job of playing man’s best friend. Jane’s attrac- tion to Mr. Rochester is interrupted by his love interest, Blanche Ingram, a woman of undeniable beauty with a flawless dark-skinned complexion and large dark eyes, but her lips are tightly pursed and her nose is tilted high. Although he had planned to marry Blanche, Mr. Roch- ester asks Jane to marry him instead. She gladly accepts but the wedding day is abruptly ended when it is an- nounced that he is already married to Bertha Mason (Melanie Marshall), a woman from Spanish Town, Ja- maica who had gone insane and is locked up but man- ages to tear Jane’s veil in half. Dressed in a blood-red satin dress with a scoop neckline and three-quarter length puff sleeves, she sings throughout the play in a beautiful voice.