Jane Eyre
National Theatre at Home. “Jane Eyre.” Youtube.com, National Theatre, April 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KPE6uXhFEU&list=PLJgBmjHpqgs6urDHULQEBXwrUVbYsGGCr.
(Note: As the production was live streamed, the full show has been removed from YouTube, the link above leads to official videos on the production by National Theatre)
In light of the global pandemic, the National Theatre in London decided to release some of their recorded plays on Youtube for hungry playgoers to feel some relief from such an unsettling and isolating time. One of the plays they chose to release was their recent adaptation of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The play was so compelling that I quickly forgot I was watching from my laptop in my kitchen. I was transported to the romantic countryside of England and fell in love with the fierce and fiercely independent Jane. I have not read the novel Jane Eyre in a long time, so I cannot say if the play represented the novel well, but I can assume by the treatment of the themes, characters and overarching ideas that the adaptors gave Bronte the respect she had earned.
It would have been easy for the adaptation to remove or ignore the theological lessons of the book, but National Theatre refused to broadly paint religion in any light, negative or positive. The same scene had the cruel religious headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst, punish Jane for crimes she did not commit, and the loving young orphan Helen tell Jane she is able to love and forgive because of her deep personal relationship with God. It is Jane’s interactions with Helen inspire her own faith journey, which compels her to forgive her spiteful aunt and motivates her refusal to live with Mr. Rochester while he is still married. It would have been easy in the time of secular humanism to show Mr. Brocklehurst’s stern and heartless religion and leave out the love and grace of Helen, but the National Theatre did not take cheap shots. They made it clear that Mr. Brocklehurt is not a representation of all Christians.
Like their refusal to “take sides” in religious debate, there was always more going on than what may be seen and assumed at face-value in this adaptation. I was struck by the many contrasting characters in similar situations. At face value these characters seemed to be the same but in the end they had very different attitudes and outcomes. Mr. Brocklehurst was a clergyman who tried to force the girls at Lowood School into heaven with fear and an iron fist. St. John is also a clergyman, and he could be very stern, but he is revealed to be a loving preacher who becomes a good friend and confidant to Jane later in the story. And Mr. Rochester’s fair treatment of his ward Adele is a clear contrast to Jane’s spiteful aunt. It isn’t only in these contrasts that the play reveals that there was more going on than what appears at face value, but also in the complexity of the characters themselves. Mr. Rochester was a man with a hard and gruff exterior, but as the story progresses he is revealed as loving, clever and fair - seeing people for their inherent worth instead of their social status. Jane herself was imperfect and easily dismissable, a conflicted woman driven by passion and a ferocity that got her into trouble, but it was this same passion that drove her to love deeply, forgive fearlessly and stand up for herself against all odds of society and expectation.
National Theatre’s Jane Eyre was an excellent story beautifully presented. The collaborators who made the adaptation succeeded in creating a deeply moving play that captured the themes and romanticism of Bronte’s original novel in a fresh way for a new generation.