Charlotte Brontë’s final novel – considered by many to be superior to the better-known Jane Eyre – was written in the wake of her sisters’ deaths. It’s suffused with loneliness and melancholy as plain, poor, unmarried Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional Belgian town of Villette and takes up a post in a girls’ school. There, she observes those around her and falls fiercely and painfully in love. Virginia Woolf was a great admirer of a book that is both secretive and yet full of emotional disclosure and which has significant passages of internal reflection.
These become internal monologues in this bold adaptation by Linda Marshall Griffiths who ditches the bonnets and bustles. She relocates the story to the future and to an archaeological dig searching for the bones of a nun who many centuries earlier was known to have survived an Ebola-like pandemic and whose remains may harbour much needed antibodies to the virus, which is once again killing millions.
Brontë’s Lucy Snowe was an unvalued female outsider in a patriarchal society. Marshall Griffiths’s Lucy, a virologist, is even more of an outcast: she is a clone, created only for the purpose of work. The virus has killed her sibling clones Esme and Ashe, just as tuberculosis carried off Brontë’s sisters, Emily and Anne. To the dig leader, the controlling, watchful and jealous Beck (Catherine Cusack), Lucy is less than human. But her heart beats as fiercely and she feels as deeply, which becomes apparent when she falls first for the doctor John Bretton (Nana Amoo-Gottfried) and then for the damaged, lonely Paul (Philip Cairns).
One of the pleasures of the novel is the vividness with which the characters are drawn, and that depth of wry observation is lacking here. Marshall Griffiths can’t solve the problem that Snowe is a passive protagonist to whom things happen – which, in dramatic terms, leeches the energy further from a staging by Mark Rosenblatt that captures a sense of constant surveillance but which often feels quite distanced and cold. The best scenes are often the most comic: Paul’s nervous attempt to take Lucy on a picnic, the concept of which neither of them have fully grasped; the Christmas spent with John Bretton and his mother. These scenes have a warmth and make the characters seem distinctive and alive as they seldom are elsewhere in the evening.
This is not a typical page-to-stage adaptation but rather a standalone play inspired by source material. You can admire the ambition but not always the execution, and it often feels as if Marshall Griffiths needed to get further away from the original rather than being tied to its Gothic coat-tails. This Lucy Snowe begins at such a fever pitch that there is nowhere else for her to go, and while Laura Elsworthy gradually makes you warm to her, she is given too little opportunity to expose Lucy’s yearning heart and really make us care for her future happiness.
- At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until 15 October. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
