WIDE SARGASSO SEA. To 11 October.
Glasgow
WIDE SARGASSO SEA
by Jean Rhys adapted by Jon Pope
Citizens' Circle Studio To 11 October 2003
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runms 2hr One interval
TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
www.citizens.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 October
Stay at home and read a good book? A fine central performance and some striking moments can't disguise the untheatrical orgiins of this piece.Theatre's found several ways to adapt novels. Jon Pope uses two. His first, problematic, act virtually consists of monologues, intercutting - though not much; rthis is very largely Antoinette's account - the pre-history of Jane Eyre's predecessor as wife to Mr Rochester.
More successfully, the second half deals with the pair's marriage and its destruction in more realistic manner. This works well enough, though to getting most from the piece requires either supernatural concentration or a knowledge of Jean Rhys' novel. Getting much at all probably needs aqcuaintance with the story of Jane Eyre.
As both books are readily available, there seems no substantial reason to pitch in with the concentration to come across the story this way. It's individual choice whether revisiting a known story's worth the price of a trip out and a ticket.
The main performing burden falls on to Brigid Zengeni. For much of the first act it seemed the visuals were distractions. Zengeni plays so well I could have sat listening to her telling the story without distractions from lighting, sounds and the 'rub-their-faces-in-it' stew of body-blooded clothing, lavatory-bucket and dirtied bed. (The latter, though, comes to makes a neat contrast with the elegantly-covered bed for the happy period of the Rochesters' marriage.)
Her Antoinette - known to Rochester as Bertha - comes from bad stock. There's madness there, and a name-changed upbringing by nuns. Zengeni captures the range of mood, from elation to desolation, besides briefly characterising others who haughtily comment upon her as a child. Her performance gathers in to a coherent whole this woman's violence, pain and regrets.
Pope's also more sexually explicit than either novelist could be, both in the fury of bedtop rutting and the explicit obscenities Antoinette hurls at her husband.
This is in the second act, which works better, as the double-bed more clearly earns its sympbolic place at the centre of the Circle Studio's limited acting space.
Anne Myatt contributes vivid, vehement portraits of Antoinette's Carribbean servant, and the Yorkshire minder Rochester puts on his wife in England. Tristram Wymark is technically sound but ill-defined in character.
Overall though, the original narratives win out for storytelling.
Antoinette Cosway: Brigid Zengeni
Edward Rochester: Tristram Wymark
Grace Poole: Anne Myatt
Director/Designer: Jon Pope
Lighting: Michael Lancaster
2003-10-04 18:27:45