Jane Eyre review: Northern Ballet Sadler’s Wells, London
CHOREOGRAPHER Cathy Marston doesn’t look for the easy way out. Created a couple of years ago, her version of Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 tale of love and rejection – is a complicated and gloomy reflection of the heavy price you pay for love in the Yorkshire Ridings.
Maybe the subject fits very well into Northern Ballet’s homelands but Marston’s telling is enveloped in the heavy-handed insistence on the unfairness of life for the female of the species. Danced to a commissioned Philip Feeney score, the work is in two doom-laden acts set amid Patrick Kinmouth’s scenery of middle class respectability.
For a change the male corps de ballet changes the set as the action moves between the drawing room, church and moors. And this is where the evening is partly rescued.
Northern Ballet’s dancers are a devoted bunch, committed to artistic director David Nixon’s ambitions.
The work’s first 10 minutes or so are a mystery. The back of the stage is raised 6ft and for a time dancers run across and up and down as well as filling the empty centre stage occasionally.
Oh, we have seen it all so much before as the tormented Jane (Dreda Blow) is shunned by the local respectable folk.
Then when Rochester first appears, he brings his saddle into the drawing room.
Talk about overstatement.
Irritatingly, Marston starts the love duet between Jane and Rochester that we are all waiting for then breaks it up as passion begins to surge causing a sense of frustration that, regrettably, is repeated again and again.
Then into this maelstrom of characters comes a mad woman claiming to be Rochester’s wife (Victoria Sibson).
We know she must be mad because her hair is loose and her dress ripped and she gouges Rochester’s eyes out.
There is an uncomfortable feeling that Bronte has got her own back on mankind as Rochester, cruelly penalised for being male.
Marston has enthusiastically entered Bronte’s world but unfortunately has taken it all too seriously.