Featuring a breath-taking performance by Ariadna Gil, this Catalan adaptation of Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre distances itself from the bleak, freezing Yorkshire moors and reimagines the north of England as a stiflingly formal lobby, with a grand piano and four identical doors reflected ad infinitum in vast mirrors at each end. 

Taking on such a literary classic was daunting, admits director Carme Portaceli; the 500 page Romantic novel, published in 1847, has been cut down to just two hours by Anna Maria Ricart, who lifted key lines of the book in an authentic adaptation that honours the need to tell Catalan audiences the story.

Gil plays the
eponymous lead in a permanent state of fragile defiance, pale and
thin in a figure-hugging outfit, she seems always in danger of overexcitement;
behind dark glittering eyes a savage intelligence lurks and escapes
in bursts in a resonant voice of surprising authority. Her emotional landscape is revealed though huge colourful projections: real views of the Brontë’s home in Howarth painted over impressionistically in a creative confusion of fiction and fact. Occasionally Jane lifts herself out of the drama to address the audience directly, as if assuming the guise of her author, Charlotte Brontë, who herself adopted the male pseudonym ‘Currer Bell’ to get her novel published.



The writer Henry James described a ‘house of fiction’ with a million windows, each one a novelist looking onto reality, and there’s something of this in the way Jane constructs her own life story, characters appearing and disappearing as if by her command. The one and only time when Jane leaves the stage, chaos descends, characters lose their coherence.
The play digresses on the novel to explain the story of ‘Bertha’ – the hysteric in the attic. This detour, that draws on the 1966 Jane Eyre ‘prequel’ Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys makes a troubling interlude, pointing accusingly to Rochester’s libertine past… Yet, happily, love and liberty win out in the end, for “this isn’t realism,” states Abel Folk, who plays Rochester: “this is romance”!