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The second Mrs Rochester Cheltenhalm
Everyman Theatre
06/30/2000 - and 2* July 2000
Michael Berkeley Jane Eyre
Natasha Marsh (Jane), Andrew Slater (Mr Rochester), Emily Bauer-Jones (Mrs
Rochester), Beverly Mills (Mrs Fairfax), Tabitha Watling (Adele)
Michael Rafferty (conductor), Michael McCarthy (director)
Music Theatre Wales The idea of Michael Berkeley's and David Malouf's "new chamber opera"
Jane Eyre could in itself raise several questions. A cynic might
wonder whether Berkeley is aiming for the "great books" constituency, like
a significant proportion of American opera composers. A seventies feminist
might ask whether Charlotte Brontë's transgressive narrative can
survive the normative structures of an opera, where the madwoman is by
convention the heroine destroyed. A common reader might be puzzled as to
how Brontë's weighty novel could fit into a ninety-minute chamber
opera. But Berkeley and Malouf jointly bring off an ingenious trick with
mirrors which comes close to answering them. Jane Eyre is definitely
a chamber opera, but the chamber is the reflective one of her mind.
The opera consists of Jane's memory of her experience at Thornfield, from
Mrs Fairfax and Adele's welcome to her flight on the eve of her wedding
when she encounters the first Mrs Rochester. The first part ends with
Rochester's proposal and her acceptance, and the second with his cries
intruding on her present and causing her to go to him again. Each part
begins with Jane, then Mrs Fairfax and Adele, Rochester repeats his
narrative in each part, and Mrs Rochester attacks in the same place. (It's
not clear how the narrative symmetries are related to the fact that
Berkeley had to write the first part of the opera again after the only
draft was stolen.) The overarching symmetry, though, is that between Jane
and Mrs Rochester, introspective soprano (who happens to be willows and
pale) singing extended lyrical lines and distraught Carmen-ish mezzo
singing scraps and snatches, circling around each other and eventually
meeting face to face before Jane (perhaps) subsumes Mrs Rochester by
marrying Mr Rochester. It's not quite Carmen with Michaela getting
the guy, but only because Michaela manages to acquire just a touch of
Carmen's danger.
Critics have noted the similarities with The turn of the screw, in
the spooly glissandos of the music as well as the
governess-in-strange-household plot. Berkeley's music is essentially an
enjoyable melodrama, with a hysterical outburst in Adele's summary of
Lucia di Lammermoor at the start and a couple of naive interludes
that lack all the terror of Britten's "Malo". Adele and Lucia seem surplus
to requirements, an attempt to evoke an operatic excess that isn't there in
the material. The scene where Jane asks Adele about Mr Rochester seems, as
a couple of critics have also noted, to invoke another comparison, with
Pelléas et Mélisande, where a pallid stranger brings
emotional turmoil to a grim household. But this doesn't quite come off
either: the plot of Jane Eyre is referential and emotionally
specific, as is the music.
Still, if Jane Eyre is not quite sure what sort of opera it is, it
is quite a rewarding way to spend an afternoon or a short evening. There is
certainly pleasure to be found in the distillation of a powerful romance
into a succinct mental drama. Music Theatre Wales' excellent production,
with a set made of semi-mirrors and Mrs Rochester in an attic above the
central door, was ingenious and gently disturbing. Michael McCarthy's
direction emphasise4d the suggestive parallels between Jane's desire and
Mrs Rochester's delirium by matching them in various ways, within a
conventional period drama acting style. The singers gave rounded dramatic
performances, though Beverly Mills as Mrs Fairfax and Tabitha Watling as
Adele really had little substantive to do.
Natasha Marsh as Jane, though, was sweetly passionate. Emily Bauer-Jones
was intense and distubing as Mrs Rochester, and Andrew Slater was vocally
suitably heavy but perhaps not quite aggressive as Mr Rochester. Michael
Rafferty and the thirteen-piece orchestra generally provided an organic
dramatic setting for the voices.
H.E. Elsom
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