It is no surprise to learn that Polly Teale was inspired to write After Mrs Rochester while adapting Jane Eyre for the stage. The two plays, both also directed by Teale, have a lot in common: not least their use of Bertha Mason, the incarcerated Creole wife in Charlotte Brontë's novel, as an expression of the heroine's sexuality and hidden self.
In this play, the heroine is Jean Rhys, the Dominican novelist who felt such a kinship with Brontë's character that she transformed events from her own life into an entire biography for Bertha: the novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
Like Bertha, Rhys left her home for drab, depressing England; like Bertha, she found herself trapped by men into a spiral of self-destruction. As Bertha, Sarah Ball is constantly on stage, writhing, screeching and unleashing all the rage Jean initially keeps locked inside.
Occasionally her presence is illuminating, not least when Jean struggles to shut her up; more often it is an encumbrance, hammering home themes that yearn for a subtler treatment. We simply don't need to see Bertha behaving like a dog when Jean meets Ford Madox Ford: Jean's helplessness is expressive enough.
Jean herself is further divided, so that we see the young woman whose disastrous relationship with her mother destroys her sense of self-worth, and the older novelist, who in turn rejects her own daughter, and says that if she could have chosen between writing and happiness, she would have taken happiness.
There is a wonderful dismayed fondness about Diana Quick's elder Jean as she watches her youthful self, vibrantly played by Madeleine Potter; in one exquisite moment, yet another man tells Potter that she has beautiful eyes, and Quick responds by rolling hers.
But Teale doesn't leave much room for such detail, preferring to repeatedly layer scenes from Jane Eyre, flashbacks to Rhys's days in Dominica and appearances from Jean's scolding mother until the stage is cluttered. Rhys's life is fascinating, but the trouble with Teale's presentation of it is that the style takes over.
Bearing in mind that Teale took the same approach to Jane Eyre's story (and to that of Maggie in her 2001 co-production of The Mill on the Floss), that style no longer has novelty to recommend it.
More problematically, Bertha's raging and squirming seems to equate women's sexual desire with hysterical savagery. This may not be Teale's intention, but you wish the door to such an interpretation wasn't left ajar.
· Until September 20. Box office: 020-7369 1791.
