The treat we chose for the last day of August was a day at Sudbury Quay theatre for Dot Production’s adaptation of ‘Jane Eyre’. We saw their version of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ in 2019, and we’re still raving about it to friends. With only five actors, we assumed they’d cut the part of Margaret the youngest of the three Dashwood daughters, but they had a brilliant solution – characters occasionally asking where Margaret was and getting a witty off-stage reply. Casting one of the female actors as Robert Ferrars the fop and a male actor as Nancy Steele the strident, extrovert younger sister of Lucy Steele was genius.
We were looking forward to Jane Eyre. We’d not read the novel, but we knew the story in the same way as everyone knows the outline of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ even if they’ve never read it. We arrived early, dressed for winter. The play was in the marquee outside the theatre itself, and it was forecast to be a windy night, but the volunteers were on hand with fleece blankets and directions to the bar. Next to our seats was a tall laurel hedge with sunflowers poking through and cars idling in the car park beyond. The wind blew through the open sides of the tent all night, and we were grateful for the blanket.
It was worth being cold. It was a great production. It had all the drama of the Brontes’ work and some modern takes too – I don’t know whether Charlotte Bronte made reference to the brutal treatment that Mrs Mason-Rochester might have experienced in a Victorian asylum for the insane as an alternative to her incarceration in the attics of Thornfield Hall, but it was a good point – possibly one that Victorian readers would have understood, or one that they may not have wanted to have explained to them.
I admit I ducked at one point. Pat Bush as the supervisor of Lowewood School treated the audience as the additional pupils and pointed at me saying “Julia has too much hair! Why is Julia allowed so much curly red hair? It must be cut off!” It’s been a few years since I had curly hair, but I was biting my lip not to reply – then she pointed at the other side of the audience and insisted that all those topknots must be cut off. Phew. Start with them, please.
Pat Bush missed an open goal in her adaptation by missing the famous line of “Reader, I married him”, but by the end of it we got what Jane Eyre’s character was – independent, unbending and returning whatever favour she was dealt, be it punches, insults or love. It’s sent us home keen to read the book, looking for Dot’s next production and above all, cheered up by getting back to the theatre after all this time.
Julia Chalkley 