Theatre reviews: Jane Eyre/Porridge/Soup

Published on Wednesday 10 March 2010 18:09

JANE EYRE *** PERTH THEATRE PORRIDGE *** KING'S THEATRE, EDINBURGH SOUP *** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

IN THE age of "chick lit" – full of ideas of female raunchiness almost entirely shaped by a male-dominated porn industry – it's downright refreshing, on a Saturday lunchtime in Perth, to be plunged back into the 19th century world of Charlotte Bront.

Bront lived, after all, in an age when sex was rarely discussed in public. She was, therefore, able, as one of the boldest artists of her age, to define the erotic almost entirely for herself; and what she created – in the encounter between her mousy but passionate heroine Jane Eyre, and Jane's brooding, life-scarred lover Mr Rochester – is one of the great enduring templates of all romantic literature, still adored by women across the world.

Bront was a true proto-feminist, of course. In Jane Eyre, she smashes the starry-eyed phase of Jane's romance – full of language that seems to reduce Jane to Rochester's plaything – with a mighty fist of rebellious truth; she allows the happy ending only when Jane has found her own fortune, and Rochester has been blinded into physical dependency. But what is most striking about the story is Bront's insistence that Jane should be true to her own fierce physical feeling for Rochester. "Nothing speaks or stirs in me when you talk," cries Jane to her respectable clergyman admirer, when he proposes marriage; and even today, women instantly recognise that tension between the man who offers everything you could reasonably want in life, and the man who seems – despite everything – to be the best reason for living at all.

There's already something slightly comical and dated about Polly Teale's 1997 stage version of the novel, which rushes with a kind of rash and literal theatrical energy at the novel's central symbolic tension between Jane, the mousy governess in the Thornfield schoolroom – played with a nice, unpretentious passion, at Perth, by Kath Duggan – and Bertha, the mad Creole wife in the attic, who represents unchained female sexuality and rage, and is brought to life by a fiercely athletic Vanessa Cook. This vivid physical image of Jane's divided self works well at some moments – notably during Jane's uneasy early romance with Rochester – and looks more awkward at others.

Even at its least convincing, though, it always brings a powerful theatrical and visual energy to Ian Grieve's production, which features a strong multi-level design by Ken Harrison, and excellent live and recorded music and sound by Jon Beales and Iain Johnstone. And if Tom McGovern, as Rochester, is not exactly the romantic hero of our dreams – no woman director would have cast him, I fear – he still makes a bold attempt both at a Yorkshire accent, and at the brooding presence of a romantic homme fatal; bold enough, at any rate, to let the dynamism of Bront's mighty story speak for itself, in a voice that still seems radical and disturbing, 163 years on.

It's perhaps revealing of the pace of change in British society, over the last generation, that the world of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais's Porridge – one of the great British sitcoms of the 1970s – now seems as close to the old institutional England of Dickens and Bront as it does to the 21st century world of privatised prisons. After the roaring success of last week's Dinnerladies – sculpted into a highly effective stage play by director David Graham – I had high hopes for the stage touring version of Porridge, playing in Edinburgh this week.

Despite an interesting range of performances, though – notably from ex-EastEnders star Shaun Williamson in the Ronnie Barker role of Fletcher, and a touching and impressive Daniel West as his young cellmate Godber – Gavin McAlinden's production lacks the kind of storyline that would enable it to achieve any real theatrical energy. There are jokes, there's some decent acting, there's a smoothly efficient set by Paul Wills. But in the end, the show looks like a series of half-comic scenes gradually running into the well-tunnelled sand beneath Slade Prison; rather than a muscular, well-structured stage show that would support the actors in equalling both the dry ferocity of the performances in the original television series, and their razor-sharp comic timing.

This week's Oran Mor lunchtime play, meanwhile – heading for the Traverse next week – is Ella Hickson's Soup, a third play from one of the most talented young writers around.

The borscht in question is served up to our young student hero Dan and his fragile father James – a once-mighty newspaper film critic who has just lost his job in a switch to "online content" – by their loving but harassed mother and wife Annie, a clergywoman with a series of Easter vigils to run.

Somewhere in the background of the play, there is an Easter theme about fatherly love, and what James can or should do to protect Dan from looming romantic disaster; there's also a weird obsession with the fate of arts criticism in the age of the internet, a subject close to the heart of any critic, but surely of limited interest to a general audience.

The "soup" metaphor apparently refers to the bubbling mix of undifferentiated voices that make up our online world. But if Hickson has not yet quite sorted out the play's various strands of meaning, it's still perceptive enough in detail, and sharp enough in characterisation, to support three enjoyable performances from Finn den Hertog, Bridget McCann and John McColl; and to promise better things to come, when Hickson finally decides which kind of soup she's making, and what should be the prime ingredient.

&149 Jane Eyre is at Perth Theatre until 20 March; Porridge is at the King's, Edinburgh, until Saturday; Soup is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday, and at the Traverse, Edinburgh, 16-20 March.