After Mrs. Rochester (review)

Shared Experience is best known for its innovative adaptations of novels such as Jane Eyre, War and Peace, and Mill on the Floss, the last of which was brought to the Kennedy Center in 2001. In their latest work, After Mrs. Rochester, Shared Experience takes up the challenge of staging the life of author Jean Rhys.

Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea has been hailed as a postcolonial masterpiece, but Rhys herself remains relatively unknown. Having grown up in Dominica, she was fascinated by the figure of Bertha Mason, the West Indian "madwoman in the attic" in Jane Eyre, and her revisionist account of Bertha's upbringing is a provocative prequel that raises important questions about gender and colonialism. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette, whose childhood is based on Rhys's own experiences, marries the wary young Rochester; later, convinced that she is mad, he colonizes (Anglicizes) her as Bertha in an attempt to control her identity and behavior.

It was the parallels between Antoinette/Bertha and Rhys herself that fascinated playwright and director Polly Teale when she researched her adaptation of Jane Eyre in 1997. The white Creole immigrant living in England, isolated and misunderstood, estranged from family, and given to fits of temper, described Rhys as well as her heroine; and Teale used those parallels as the foundation of After Mrs. Rochester. What emerges is a kind of double borrowing that allows the narrative threads to be intricately woven: Rhys patterns Antoinette's narrative on her own early life; then Teale patterns her dramatization of Ella (the name of Rhys as a young woman) on Rhys's fictional Antoinette. Life and art imitate one another in complex and fascinating ways.

The physical production, designed by Angela Davies, situates the viewer within multiple frames: a unit set that ostensibly represents an attic room but also resembles a ship, with a wardrobe and door frame as the prow, and piles of books scattered about the floor like stepping stones or piers. Inside this room are Jean (Diana Quick), an older alcoholic recluse who has shut her grown daughter out as she drinks and reads a manuscript aloud; and Bertha (Sarah Ball), Brontë's madwoman who sleeps on the floor beside Jean. Just as Bertha was locked up, so Jean has locked out the world, retreating into memories as she struggles to give shape to her novel. Bertha becomes an extension of Jean's psyche. Jean calls up characters from her past: her mother appears in Jamaica, dragging and horsewhipping her daughter Ella (Madeleine Potter); Ella's childhood friend, black Tite, leads her across the stones and up over the wardrobe to the river; and, as Tite and Ella read Jane Eyre, Rochester interviews Jane for her governess position. The melding of the three figures (Bertha the abused wife, Jean the tormented writer, and Ella the displaced Creole) occurs literally as well as figuratively. Bertha and Ella huddle against Jean for protection; after they fall asleep, Jean wakes and begins writing on Bertha's body. When Ella dines out in Paris, she slips food to Bertha under the table; and as Jean descends into madness, Bertha becomes more verbal and active.