Absorbing and beautifully designed: Jane Eyre reviewed

Blackeyed Theatre is another victim of the virus. Its production of Jane Eyre was midway through a UK tour, and due to visit China for a month, when the pandemic shot its plans to bits. Last month the show was revived on stage and committed to film. Kelsey Short (Jane) leads a team of just five actors who tell the story as Charlotte Brontë wrote it.

The costumes, hairstyles and habits of speech seem authentically Victorian. The director, Adrian McDougall, has rejected the fashionable habit of presenting Jane as a rad-fem freedom fighter surrounded by grotesque male oppressors. His version reminds us how sympathetic the novel is towards men. Mr Rochester (Ben Warwick) is a romantic enigma, a dashing, grizzled buccaneer who is also decent, honourable and kind-hearted. Socially he’s a rebel. He exposes the hypocrisy of the marriage market by favouring Jane, a penniless governess, over the wealthy beauties competing for his hand.

When her nuptials are cancelled at the last minute, Jane is rescued from destitution by St John Rivers, a scholarly and idealistic clergyman who wants to travel east and convert Indians to Christianity. One theory holds that these two male figures are based on Branwell Brontë, Charlotte’s older brother, an imaginative but unpredictable alcoholic painter. Mr Rochester is Branwell drunk. St John Rivers is Branwell sober.

This is an absorbing, beautifully designed version that will please the casual viewer as well as the lazy student who wants to revisit the text without the hassle of moving his eyes across the page.

The Party Hop is an online satire set in a virus-ravaged future. Lockdown has been imposed for three long years and the new generation of young adults now believe that physical contact with those outside the ‘family bubble’ is abnormal.