'Inspiring' take on 'Jane Eyre' in NT Live production
Macon's Douglass Theatre has a handsome Christmas present for fans of Charlotte Bronte. A stage adaptation of the 18th-century novelist's "Jane Eyre" is being presented in the National Theatre Live in HD series at the historic theater on Sunday afternoon.
The London media -- using such terms as "inspiring," "dynamic" and "exhilarating" -- is proclaiming that the production is one of which Bronte herself might well have approved.
The production originated last year at the Bristol Old Vic as a two-part work said to have been "devised" by the ensemble. Now the parts have been combined into a single 210-minute drama and moved to the National Theatre in London.
The title role in the adaptation is played by Madeleine Worrall, and soon enough we will meet Rochester (Felix Hayes) and his dog Pilot, but first the young Jane has to confront numerous cruelties and injustices of life.
The simple set is adapted to serve as various locales, ranging from a stage coach to a decaying mansion. This methodology would seem to be quite suitable, given that much of the power of reading the novel derives from the reader's own imagination.
As a novel, "Jane Eyre" is celebrated for pioneering the revelation of the narrator's private consciousness, and this "reimagining" of the text is true to the original in that sense. It's all here: Jane's abuse as a child, the maltreatment at Lowood School, her planned marriage and the discovery of Rochester's mad wife.
Far from being pushed aside by more modern female authors, Bronte's portrait of her plain but feisty heroine and her exploration of classism, feminism and other contemporary threads have produced a novel that lives on still.
The reviewers say that the NT Live ensemble has taken the novel and "devised" something that is simultaneously true to the original yet enables the viewer to see young Jane's travails in an entirely new light. The Jane who emerges is not the glamorous heroine of film, the critics say, but rather the plain, resolute Jane that -- since created in 1847 by "Currer Bell" -- millions have come to revere.
NT Live: "Jane Eyre"
When: 3 p.m. Dec. 20
Where: Douglass Theatre, 355 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Cost: $20 adults, $15 students and seniors
Information: 478-742-2000
This story was originally published December 17, 2015 at 6:39 PM with the headline "'Inspiring' take on 'Jane Eyre' in NT Live production ."