Jane Eyre may describe herself as “plain, and little”, but how do you make a little musical about a literary heroine who looms so large? That question lies at the heart of Jane Eyre: a Musical, currently on at London’s Southwark Playhouse.

Adapted by John Caird and Paul Gordon from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, the production has itself undergone a process of dramatic reduction, from a lavish 30-member cast in a large theatre in 1996 to this intimate “chamber” version.

Caird’s justification for this reduction is compelling. In an interview, he described Jane Eyre as “fundamentally an intimate, emotional, small-scale work”, pointing to the novel’s first-person narration and its intensely interior focus.

But Jane Eyre is not a “small-scale work”. Certainly, Jane’s journey takes her through only a handful of Yorkshire houses and a school. Yet Brontë’s imagination repeatedly exceeds these confines. The novel conjures supernatural forces, wild landscapes and sweeping moorland. Its emotional world is equally expansive, moving from the warmth of passion to the terror of fire and freezing wastes. Its Yorkshire landscapes convey a strange, almost supernatural power. The result is a novel that constantly stretches beyond the limits of Jane’s confined domestic world.

Through elemental forces Brönte invokes the gothic mode which had fascinated her and her siblings since childhood. In Jane Eyre, she tempers gothic madness and passion with domestic realism. Jane’s narration dwells on clothes, food, weather, teaching and the gentle boredom of Thornfield before........

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