Double identity

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I can’t make up my mind about Shared Experience. Since 1988, this company has been adapting classic works of literature, transforming some of the greatest books in the Western canon into visceral pieces of physical theatre. The results are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, the plays are rarely more than crude summaries of the original novels, almost as if they’ve been designed to help GCSE English students revise for their exams. But on the other, they’re undoubtedly theatrical, retelling these famous stories on stage in ways that are often very imaginative.

Jane Eyre, which is the most famous example of Shared Experience’s work, is a case in point. Polly Teale, the woman who adapted and directed it, has clearly got hold of the idea that Bertha, Mr Rochester’s promiscuous first wife, is the alter ego of the sexually repressed heroine. Thus, in the opening scene, the actress playing Bertha is physically intertwined with the actress playing Jane Eyre, signifying that they’re two halves of the same soul. They’re only separated after this idea has been firmly planted in the audience’s mind, but, just in case anyone has missed it, Bertha is constantly emerging from the shadows to mimic Jane’s movements — and, at the end, the two actresses are reunited, with Bertha curling up at Jane’s feet like a cat.

Now, in some respects there’s something fundamentally misguided about this. It’s not so much that this interpretation of the novel is wrong; more that Polly Teale doesn’t leave the audience any room to come to this conclusion themselves. In effect, by decoding the book, she robs the story of its mystery and, as a result, it loses much of its power. Watching the play, I was reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s analysis of why the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey was such a miserable failure.