Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and its prequel, Wild Sargasso Sea, written by the white Creole, West Indies-born writer Jean Rhys, are novels regularly handed down from mothers to their daughters. In Polly Teale's imaginative reconstruction of the turbulent life of Rhys, the legacies handed on from mother to daughter are rather more damaging.
Like the young Jane Eyre, who is punished for her wildness by being imprisoned in the Red Room, so the young Rhys is punished for running wild in Dominica by being banished by her controlling mother to the cold, dark prison of England. Yet Rhys identified not with Jane but with Rochester's first wife, Bertha, the mad Creole woman in the attic. There was to be no happy ending for her: rather, a string of disastrous relationships with men and the bottle, a daughter abandoned at birth and a couple of novels.
Teale and Shared Experience have already successfully staged Jane Eyre, and initially the return to some of the same material seems both self-reverential and distancing, like some insane postmodern discourse. It is hard to get any emotional grip on a piece whose multi-layering comes across as at best tricksy and at worst slightly arch. Then, 20 minutes in, the old Shared Experience magic begins to work and the alchemy of the text rubbing up against the manifestly physical subtext, of fact and fiction, biography and creative licence, creates something combustible and hugely affecting - particularly when the performances from the ensemble are as cracking as they are here.
There will almost certainly be those who will dismiss this evening as upmarket chick-lit that comes with literary credentials. However, it is so much more: a story of what mothers do to their daughters and, perhaps most interestingly, the price so often paid for female creativity: personal and domestic happiness. Rhys's room of her own was a prison, and all her life she attempted to write her way out. She never succeeded. But the writing was an exorcism. "When you've written it down," she said, "it doesn't hurt any more."
· Until May 10. Box office: 08700 500 511. Then touring to Cambridge and Guildford.
