Much like Emerald Fennell’s film of Wuthering Heights, this musical version of another Brontë sister’s literary masterpiece is lovely to look at. Designer Morgan Large’s monochrome palette fashions the women in black corseted dresses with attractive ruffles and delicate mesh detailing. Behind them on a screen, a mist appears to roll over sketches of moorland, graves and barren trees. It’s winningly atmospheric. But also like Fennell’s film, there’s too little beneath the frills in an adaptation (music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, book and additional lyrics by John Caird) that struggles to tap into the substance of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel.
Though smart-mouthed and bolshie as a child (played commendably on press night by Emily-Rose Samuel), there’s scant sense of a strong-willed, independent thinker in Charlie Burn’s adult Jane, who under Caird and Megan McGinnis’s direction is as pure and polite as a fairytale princess. Nor is there anything dark or dangerous about Ashley Gilmour’s courteous, too-charming Rochester.
There are echoes of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast in Jane’s journey here, the Gateshead Hall and Lowood school chapters of which are rushed through in order to bring her into Rochester’s orbit at Thornfield Hall.
The songs dilute the story’s grit and hardship with syrupy sentiment. The overuse of twinkly wind chimes and pop-style scoop notes become musical tics, shifting the dial closer to Disney romance than Victorian gothic. Early numbers The Governess and Forgiveness are particularly cloying. But the better songs – including Jane’s Sweet Liberty and Rochester’s As Good As You – contain hints of Schönberg and Boublil’s Les Misérables (the original UK production of which Caird co-directed). And if the material itself is broadly one-note, this is still a fine-tuned production that runs like clockwork.
The cast of 11 – about half the size of the musical’s original Broadway run in 2000 – is packed with West End talent for this long-awaited London premiere. It’s just a shame they’re working with such flimsy material.
At Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London, until 24 October
