Cross-casting – Jane Eyre
This week I went to the Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam to see the National Theatre’s Jane Eyre as a live broadcast from London. When I first read that the character of St John Rivers would be played by a woman, I was intrigued. Could such cross-casting be successful?
It is difficult to take a novel and create a stage play but the one thing that should be true to the book is characterisation. The characters should be rock-solid and totally identifiable. If they aren’t then the producer and actors have simply used the novel as a fluid inspiration for a frolic of their own. If the characters are ‘right’ then stage, props, movement and even time can be used imaginatively and even surrealistically to great effect.
The blurring of roles has always been part of drama of whatever type. It used to be a situation of female parts being played by men, or boys. More recently, an adult male-to-female part is usually one of comedy, such as a pantomime dame or the headmistress in the St Trinian’s series (Alastair Sim) or one of Alec Guinness’s twelve roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets. We are meant to laugh because such cross-casting is caricature.
Nowadays, a male part is very often played by a woman and I’m not just talking about a pantomime hero or Peter Pan. And there is only question to be answered her - is the portrayal convincing? I can think of one or two very convincing performances on film. Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously and Meryl Streep as a rabbi in Angels in America. But the latter was a bit part and not really tested.
Let’s have a look at how Jane Eyre portrays St John Rivers. He’s in his late twenties, tall and slender and has a very attractive face, like that of a classical Greek statue; he has an ivory complexion, large blue eyes and his fair hair falls over his high forehead ‘in careless locks.’ Oh yes, our Jane is very much drawn to him.
He is also intellectual, kind, has a social conscience and is passionately in love – with a rich young woman who returns his feelings. So do his sisters and Jane start pricing spoons and toasting forks? No, of course not. Because St John has a strong streak of Calvinist melancholy that despises the love he has for the attractive Rosamond and turns his adoration and his romantic passion into a calling to become a missionary, to pursue a zealously, piously charitable life in India. He is almost repelled by Jane yet tries to persuade her to marry him and come with him, as his ‘helpmeet and fellow-labourer’. ‘You are,’ says he, ‘formed for labour and not for love.’ I can’t help feeling that as a proposal it lacks a certain something.
St John, for all his beauty and perfection of mind and body, for all his subjugated passionate love for Rosamund, is fundamentally as cold towards Jane as that Greek statue to which she first likened him. She twice uses the word ‘marble’ to describe him. There is no doubt he has his feminine side, but he shows himself to be as ruthlessly powerful as a beautiful Apollo and Jane can see herself shrivelling under his golden rays. And now she realises that what the deeply-flawed Mr Rochester offered was worth so much more.
The character of St John is complex and has never, as far as I remember, been portrayed, on stage or screen satisfactorily, or at any rate according to what I feel to be the true character. I’m afraid that St John in this production was a thirteen-year-old boy in the first throes of adolescent arrogance.
So was this instance of cross-casting successful? The answer, in short, is that, for me, it wasn’t. It was disappointing. I’ll go on to say that the whole intensely pivotal part of the story, that of Jane growing up, of spending quite a long time with her newly-found cousins was crunched up, disposed of summarily as though the producer simply wanted cut to the chase, chasing Jane back to Thornfield and a tearful reunion. And that too was disappointing.
It is difficult to take a novel and create a stage play but the one thing that should be true to the book is characterisation. The characters should be rock-solid and totally identifiable. If they aren’t then the producer and actors have simply used the novel as a fluid inspiration for a frolic of their own. If the characters are ‘right’ then stage, props, movement and even time can be used imaginatively and even surrealistically to great effect.
The blurring of roles has always been part of drama of whatever type. It used to be a situation of female parts being played by men, or boys. More recently, an adult male-to-female part is usually one of comedy, such as a pantomime dame or the headmistress in the St Trinian’s series (Alastair Sim) or one of Alec Guinness’s twelve roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets. We are meant to laugh because such cross-casting is caricature.
Nowadays, a male part is very often played by a woman and I’m not just talking about a pantomime hero or Peter Pan. And there is only question to be answered her - is the portrayal convincing? I can think of one or two very convincing performances on film. Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously and Meryl Streep as a rabbi in Angels in America. But the latter was a bit part and not really tested.
Let’s have a look at how Jane Eyre portrays St John Rivers. He’s in his late twenties, tall and slender and has a very attractive face, like that of a classical Greek statue; he has an ivory complexion, large blue eyes and his fair hair falls over his high forehead ‘in careless locks.’ Oh yes, our Jane is very much drawn to him.
He is also intellectual, kind, has a social conscience and is passionately in love – with a rich young woman who returns his feelings. So do his sisters and Jane start pricing spoons and toasting forks? No, of course not. Because St John has a strong streak of Calvinist melancholy that despises the love he has for the attractive Rosamond and turns his adoration and his romantic passion into a calling to become a missionary, to pursue a zealously, piously charitable life in India. He is almost repelled by Jane yet tries to persuade her to marry him and come with him, as his ‘helpmeet and fellow-labourer’. ‘You are,’ says he, ‘formed for labour and not for love.’ I can’t help feeling that as a proposal it lacks a certain something.
St John, for all his beauty and perfection of mind and body, for all his subjugated passionate love for Rosamund, is fundamentally as cold towards Jane as that Greek statue to which she first likened him. She twice uses the word ‘marble’ to describe him. There is no doubt he has his feminine side, but he shows himself to be as ruthlessly powerful as a beautiful Apollo and Jane can see herself shrivelling under his golden rays. And now she realises that what the deeply-flawed Mr Rochester offered was worth so much more.
The character of St John is complex and has never, as far as I remember, been portrayed, on stage or screen satisfactorily, or at any rate according to what I feel to be the true character. I’m afraid that St John in this production was a thirteen-year-old boy in the first throes of adolescent arrogance.
So was this instance of cross-casting successful? The answer, in short, is that, for me, it wasn’t. It was disappointing. I’ll go on to say that the whole intensely pivotal part of the story, that of Jane growing up, of spending quite a long time with her newly-found cousins was crunched up, disposed of summarily as though the producer simply wanted cut to the chase, chasing Jane back to Thornfield and a tearful reunion. And that too was disappointing.
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