Heavyweight director John Caird - most famous for the original production of Les Mis - has been trying and in many ways succeeding in getting his musical version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre off the ground for something like 30 years now. Jane Eye: A Musical has had numerous productions over the years, including a six-month stint on Broadway from 2000-2001.
But Caird has been pretty clear that it’s never been the hit he’d hoped, and the West End remains elusive. So here it is, making its London debut in a relatively intimate fringe production that ditches fancy sets – instead we get lots of dry ice and misty projections – in order to free up some budget for a chunky 13-strong ensemble and more black lace than a 1984 episode of Top of the Pops.
Co-directed by Caird and Megan McGinnis, it’s a slick, melodious production that rapidly reveals the essential ‘problem’ with the whole endeavour. Jane Eyre is one of the greatest books ever written. Jane Eyre: A Musical is an elegant, tuneful but essentially bang-average affair that boils the source material’s unsettling gothic vision into a boilerplate period love story between Charlie Burn’s straitlaced Jane and Ashley Gilmour’s overly kooky Rochester. The story slips down too easily, with Paul Gordon’s warm, stately music far too pretty and uplifting. And while the ensemble is nominally colourblind, the decision to have a white actor playing the first Mrs Rochester feels utterly bizarre – surely not a naïve blunder but rather an effort to make Rochester himself a less problematic figure by smoothing over the most controversial element of the entire story.
It’s a pleasant couple of hours of period romance – but it’s not Jane Eyre.
