DWRF 2017: Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

This show will also appear at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival

Dunedin is incredibly lucky to have secured the latest Dyad Productions play Jane Eyre: An Autobiography for the Readers and Writers festival this year. The company first visited our southern shores during the last festival in 2015 with Dalloway, and this latest production is as stunning as the last. Rebecca Vaughan shows again that she has an alchemist’s touch on the stage. She inhabits a handful of characters from Jane Eyre and gives them life far beyond the original page. This show was an hour and a half long and not once did Vaughan drop a line or character.

Whilst there were many occasions to admire the ways characters were embodied by Vaughan, one of the most touching scenes was between Jane and Mr Rochester – Vaughan of course was playing a love scene, with all its nuances, essentially with herself, but it was so believable that members of the audience were in tears.  Let’s just pause for a moment and really think about that  – Vaughan created a climactic scene between two characters, playing both back and forth, and it was as if we were watching realist theatre. Outstanding stuff.

Other highlights included the exquisite costuming and lighting design.  It’s a hard ask getting these things right when travelling a show – designs need to be roadworthy and easy to set up.  Vaughan’s grey Victorian costume looked deceptively plan from a distance, as was fitting for Jane Eyre’s time and place in society. But up close, the immaculate pleated details and tailored shapes were remarkable. In complement to the acting and costuming, lighting design utilised colour and silhouette to astonishing effect, with reds and oranges throwing puppeteering-like shadows on a plain white backdrop.

Bravo, Dyad Productions – you really deserved that standing ovation.  If you are in Dunedin this weekend, I plead with you to go and support this international theatre, not only for the sheer delight of experiencing something so good, but also to ensure their return once more to our fair city in the years to come.

Reviewed by Lara Liesbeth

You can catch Jane Eyre: An Autobiography on Sunday 14 May at 1pm, at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin. And as stated above, Dyad will be talking Jane Eyre to the Auckland Writers Festival from Tuesday 16 – Saturday 20 May. 

Dunedin Writer’s Festival: Dalloway, Friday 8 May

‘How can one person remember all those lines?’ asked the stranger sitting next to me after the show Dalloway, at the Dunedin Readers and Writers Festival. Rebecca Vaughan, moving from character to character in Virginia Woolf’s famous story of Clarissa Dalloway and post-WW1 London, has utterly mastered and embodied each distinct personality on the stage. She is so immersed in the storytelling that, in fact, the question becomes more: how would she not know what was to be said next? She is working with genius, though; both in Woolf and Elton Townend Jones, the writer and director who has built a physical world from the pages of one of the most beloved of Woolf’s works – Mrs Dalloway.

The show begins with a version of the famous opening line of the book – ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’, but immediately moves to give breath and life to Vaughan’s characterisation of Clarissa with personal pronouns replacing that third person narrative style found in novels. It is satisfying that this fluctuates throughout and is as dynamic as the actor herself; the action moves from character to narrator to character to character – nearly all of Woolf’s imagined figures are given life on stage. Septimus Smith’s battle with post-traumatic stress syndrome, or ‘shell shock’ is just heartbreaking. Vaughan is so skilled in her craft that one forgets it is her giving life to each nuanced figure, both female and male. From Smith’s Italian wife to old suitor Peter Walsh; Vaughan quite simply gives each character the gift of life.

The ‘mermaid’s dress’ of green was immaculately cut and complemented the action. Ingenious pockets allowed Vaughan to become the masculine – Walsh in particular, as he paced the park and mused on Clarissa’s positive attributes.

If you are in Dunedin this weekend or Auckland at the upcoming 2015 Auckland Writers Festival, then this is a gem worth seeing. The words are gorgeous and the acting is incredible.

Dalloway
Fortune Theatre
8 May 2015

Reviewed by Lara Liesbeth