Botanic Garden, Glasgow
Four stars
A suitably dreich Botanic Gardens played host on Tuesday night to Jennifer Dick’s brand new adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 proto feminist classic, which opens this year’s largely non-Shakespearian Bard in the Botanics summer season. Judging by the line-up, the very current focus this year is on strong women making their way in the world in the face of overriding misogyny.
With Dick resetting the action of Bronte’s taboo busting nineteenth century novel from the grim north of England to even bleaker Scottish soil, little orphan Jane is buffeted from pillar to post as she embarks on a gradual getting of wisdom. Until, that is, she meets Mr Rochester, a posh boy himbo with a secret in the attic that comes back to haunt him.
Up until then, Jane has carved out her future with ferocious ambition and an unwillingness to suffer fools, even if her bullying cousin John does use knowledge as a weapon when he belts her with a well read paperback. This doesn’t stop her from becoming a Highland governess, while her terminal frisson with Rochester sees them spar as equals. Happy ever afters don’t come easy for Jane, alas, as lovers of Bronte’s original first person mould-breaker will be all too aware.
Stephanie McGregor embodies the play’s heroine with a studied seriousness that suggests Jane can and frequently does take on all comers en route to surviving as an independent woman. Johnny Panchaud similarly does the business as Rochester, with the pair at the centre of Dick’s own production. The remaining cast of four burl their way through multiple roles on Heather Grace Currie’s bothy like set, featuring a backdrop frieze of Scottish woodlands.
With a microphone utilised to conjure assorted ghosts, noises off and first wives, this makes for a faithful rendering of Bronte’s liberating yarn. As Jane finds her power both in her thumbnail sketch descriptions of those around her and in her own artistic endeavours, she points the way for women of the future to be able to write their own story.
ends
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