Jane Eyre A Musical – Southwark Playhouse Elephant

(L to R) Emily-Rose Samuel, Charlie Burn and Ashley Gilmour in Jane Eyre A Musical at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London. Picture: Victoria Davies

Jane Eyre A Musical continues at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London until 24 October 2026.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

Yes, yet another adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel. They’re like number 11 buses at the moment.

This musical version is imaginatively staged with an ensemble of nine from which most of the roles emerge. They form some interestingly choreographed group shapes when physical theatre takes over at, for example, the moment when Mr Rochester (Ashley Gilmour – fine tenor voice) falls off his horse.

Charlie Burn is suitably passionate and feistily determined as the adult Jane and it’s a strong idea to have her and her child self sometimes on stage at the same time because it adds a multidimensional nuance to the characterisation.

On press night young Jane and Adele were played by Emily-Rose Samuel who alternates the role with Poppy Jason at other performances. Emily-Rose, who is bilingual in English and French, is perfect casting and gets both characters perfectly: the unhappy, mutinous Jane and the ebullient Adele. They are, of course, both unwanted orphans but different in every other way. She’s a remarkably accomplished performer.

Generally speaking Paul Gordon’s music is pretty unmemorable but there’s an unseen (except via monitor screens) band of seven musicians doing a fine job under Ben Kubiak on keys as MD.

Gilmour’s Rochester, disguised as a gypsy fortune teller, gets one of the best musical moments: a sparky melodious song with a splendid “gypsy” fiddle weaving above it. Well done Will Clark on violin and Larry Hochman and Brad Haak who have done the orchestrations for this show.

Otherwise the production founders for the oddest of reasons. It tries to adhere too closely to the novel. A surprising amount of the dialogue is pure Charlotte Bronte. Normally I’d applaud that, but here it feels like a constraint as if John Caird (book, additional lyrics, co-director with Megan McGinnis) can’t quite bring himself to reinvent it. It is, though, a good idea to conflate Mrs Reed’s death scene with Jane’s meeting with St John Rivers. It enables the plot to cut to the chase more seamlessly than usual.

There is a problem too with the ensemble concept. Between them they take so many roles that I suspect if you didn’t know the novel intimately you could easily lose track of who is who and what’s going on – which is not to say that each of them isn’t doing a decently competent job as whichever character they are presenting at any given moment.

Brontë wrote Jane Eyre as a first person narrative and this production attempts to retain that but gets it jarringly wrong.  From time to time the ensemble becomes a quasi Greek chorus voicing Jane’s memories in statements, spoken in turn. It doesn’t work at all if Burn and/or Emily-Rose is on stage and silent. Jane Eyre almost more than any other character in fiction can, and should, speak for herself. If she doesn’t the whole point is lost.

Susan Elkin