skygiants

Jane on the coach with all the energetic running really delighted me. JOG JOG JOG JOG JOG.

They were pretty impressive at conveying movement which in a film would be exterior shots! And the shifting of place and time at several points (Jane going back to Thornfield) was very well done.

I was really excited for the first half of the play by how close it was to the book, and how much of her early life it kept in, although that made me more startled whenever it did veer away -- like, why this and not that? -- or whenever it did drop a bit of dialogue that was important to me, personally. Which of course is always the danger of watching an adaptation of a thing you care about

I honestly think by the time we get to the Riverses and Jane really being an heiress and an independent woman, a lot of adaptations run out of gas. (We used to be lucky if they showed Lowood at all!) I believe Mrs Gaskell says in her biography that Charlotte said she wrote like a fiend until Jane runs away from Rochester, and then she had to take a break and it wasn't quite the same when she got back to it. I love the night she spends outside and the begging scenes and how destitute she is when she gets to Moor House, though -- and like one critic said "the broken Reeds are replaced by Rivers of life." Diana and Mary are like mirror reflections of Georgiana and Eliza....and although St John starts off by being kind to Jane, he winds up being as abusive in a way as John Reed ever was. The fairy-tale reversals -- Jane has a home, Jane has a family, wait Jane has an actual family and piles of money?! -- seem to put some adapters off, but it's such a great reversal of fortune, especially since it's all rewards here on earth, not St John's disembodied Paradise.