It’s taken more than thirty years for John Caird and Paul Gordon’s musical version of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 doorstop Jane Eyre to make it to a London stage and, to be perfectly honest, it’s easy to see why.
That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have plenty going for it — it does. But it’s hobbled at such a basic level by faults that really should have been addressed in the intervening productions, rather than paraded for all to see in London.
Still, first the positives.
The cast is excellent. Charlie Burn makes a very pleasing titular lead, and on the all-too-infrequent occasions when she’s allowed to shine, she does.
Ashley Gilmour as the brooding Mr Rochester oozes barely suppressed sexual tension. In fact, the only surprising thing is that our protagonist doesn’t succumb to him earlier.
Jonathan Andrew Hume has a fine, powerful baritone that helps to keep things grounded, and of the rest of the excellent cast I’d single out Emily-Rose Samuel (alternating with Poppy Jason) as Young Jane and Rochester’s ward, Adele, who gives a very secure performance for one so young.
The Megan McGinnis/John Caird direction is fluid and, taken together with Georgina Lamb’s unobtrusive choreography, Morgan Large’s clever and flattering costumes look great on his minimal set, well lit by James Whiteside.
So, what’s wrong with it?
Well, it’s Musical Theatre 101. The writers didn’t “wrestle their material to the ground” to find what the show is about. You can get away with an awful lot of things in a novel that simply don’t work dramatically on stage.
The story should be about a young governess who is taken on to tutor the ward of a brooding loner with whom she falls in love, only to lose him at the altar, before finally getting him back when the field is clear.
The protagonist should be someone actively looking for her place in the world, and eventually finding it.
As one would have thought Mr Caird would have learned from his masterly co-adaptation of Boublil and Schönberg’s musical take on Victor Hugo’s epic, Les Misérables, for the West End stage, not everything in the book needs to be in the musical.
This version, however, gives us acres of tedious back story when we are invited to invest our emotional capital in the tragic early life of our heroine as a child — which we do.
I would humbly suggest to Messrs Caird and McGinnis that half of the first act is completely superfluous and, anyway, portrays our supposed heroine as a passive dishrag thrown from pillar to post.
The nearest thing to an “I want” song — when the engine of the show finally grinds into gear and establishes Jane as an active protagonist — is her Sweet Liberty (which is the seventh song in the show), by which time all my emotional capital had already been spent on the (however excellent) child playing Young Jane.
Then there’s the interval…
The show just stops for no apparent dramatic reason.
It would be far better to let it run on and place the interval after Jane’s Painting Her Portrait, the second song in Act Two, when there is at least a real dramatic conundrum with which to tease the audience. Namely, which of the two women vying for Rochester’s affections will get the upper hand?
Overall, Gordon’s largely through-sung score sounds excellent in isolated moments (even if the lyrics do clonk here and there), but there’s not enough variety to make it interesting and I’d genuinely forgotten it completely before I arrived at the Tube on the way home.
Still, at least I don’t now have to read the book.
Director: John Caird & Megan McGinnis
Book & Lyrics: John Caird
Music & Lyrics: Paul Gordon
Cast includes: Charlie Burn, Ashley Gilmour, Charlie Greenway, Melad Hamidi, Jonathan Andrew Hume, Izzi Levine, Hannah Lindsey, Isabelle Methven, Gemma Page, Eve Shanu-Wilson, Connor Ward, Poppy Jason, Emily-Rose Samuel
Until: 24th October 2026
Running time: 150 minutes including interval