Brighton Year-Round 2026

Jane Eyre

Brighton Little Theatre at BOAT

Genre: Adaptation, classical, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Live Music, Outdoor and Promenade, Theatre

Venue: BOAT

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

It’s back. The FringeReview award-winning show enjoys another run. Originally directed and choreographed by Nettie Sheridan at Brighton Little Theatre, in May, Polly Teale’s adaptation of Jane Eyre now transfers to BOAT till 13 June. Being BLT’s 800^th production, the souvenir programme covers the last 86 years. 

Again, Two Jane Eyres? In May 2023 Brighton Little mounted an exceptional production of Teale’s 2011 play Bronté, directed by Sheridan. Now Sheridan returns to (again) direct the first of what would turn out to be a trio of plays by Teale, the latter two original, around the family. This though is a creative adaptation, based on Teale’s work with Helen Edmundson and Shared Experience. Brighton Little has always thrived with both dramatists, and Teale’s 1998 Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre adapted by Teale is again a smash.

Here Bertha Mason emerges as Eyre’s other self, shadowing, goading, tormenting and mirroring her in some riveting choreographic moves. It’s the most mesmerising part of the production.

Teale’s telling and Sheridan’s now far more wide-ranging choreography here make this a kinetic experience in leaps and fluid silences. With the additional BOAT space, the twinning of Jane and Bertha can breathe a new exuberance. Even more, Evie McGuire’s Adele can flourish handstands and cartwheels downstage to the delight of an audience; watching McGuire fully realise the part the BLT stage necessarily constrained.

Steven Adams’ set now expands. It’s strikingly atmospheric yet versatile. Against the green baize of BOAT, Adams frames this backdrop in dark mahogany pieces, set separately. Though the taut original is necessarily sacrificed, the use of BOAT’s space is used brilliantly. No more so than when Thornfield is burning. Not just the now far fuller smoke effects, but the house being torn down by actors with wooden slats and flung books: with a flutter of separated leaves. It’s the most consummate effect I’ve ever seen at BOAT.

Elsewhere the wooden Victoriana suggests various school and Thornfield interiors; with a stage-right room locked in where for much of the action Bertha Mason is penned. There’s small hand-railed platforms gesturing flights of stairs, with undulating actors flying up and down. And… the BOAT’s terraced exit lies centrally right through the audience.

Storytelling’s both telegraphed and detailed, and settles enough for us to grasp each stage of it. A tiny snip of the kindly teacher at Lowood, and a more serious one of Jane Eyre’s inheritance – which enables Jane to repay kindness and live independently, which Teale could have touched in – is the only flaw in this otherwise remarkably full account in two hours, plus interval. That interval comes at a blissful moment, before the storm. Just nine actors mostly multi-role and still render this a compact whirligig of fate, love and redemption.

Izzy Boreham, who struck gold with Emily Jenkins’ miraculous two-hander Bobby & Amy last year, is Jane Eyre. Both truthful and idiomatic (downright Yorkshire, nuanced enough to seem genteel yet provincial) Boreham is transfixing; indeed like all the actors she seems to have gained in vocal weight, easily cutting through the BOAT outdoor acoustic. The way she expresses Jane Eyre’s feelings, her desolation, brief joys, vehement rejection tearing her to pieces, is likely to make the tears start. She’s outstanding and this latest performance only reinforces that judgement. And sometimes funny. She also reacts seamlessly to those around her.

Boreham’s also reunited with Jimmy Schofield from Bobby & Amy, though he multi-roles consummately as brat cousin John Reed, a decent teacher at Lowood, a snorting horse (with comical cloppings), Richard Mason (Bertha’s brother) and an Old Man. His fourth production with BLT, he’s soon off to Rose Bruford drama college and great things. Here he snorts a farewell.

Boreham’s initially twinned instead in an almost silent role with Polly Jones, a Rose Bruford graduate and playing Emily in that 2023 Bronté, as well as in the superb 2024 Little Women as Jo. Jones – liberated even more here – proves her eloquence extends to silence, mime and ferocity. She’s indeed hardly ever still. Though virtually silent Jones burns her way through the part. Indeed one proleptic moment has Bertha move to a frantic fire-dance when downstage the young Jane is falsely castigated as a liar calling fire, and that her house will burn down.

Jones’ moments with Boreham early on, both encouraging and holding her back as their twin child selves face odious Mrs Reed, are the most innovative elements in the play. Though this filters down as she turns antagonist. At certain points she shadows Jane’s sexual and repressed self, and at others seems to blend with her: a vicarious consummation.

But Teale also details Jane’s early suffering with Mrs Reed and later at Lowood school. Several intense scenes then leap as Jane’s suddenly a young teacher looking to be a governess. Some of the most theatrical moments spring from the fluid dissolves of storytelling here.

Joseph Bentley helms the only other single role apart from Boreham’s Jane. His Rochester is a revelation. Like Boreham and others he exudes vocal clarity and cut-through. Hr’s even more regal and thrilling than before. Bentley, who’s returned to acting more recently, scored as Branwell in Bronté, and here working with Sheridan he creates his finest performance yet. His baritonal heft is almost unrecognizable from his former lighter-voiced self. He manages to warm and infuriate, tease and charm. And sing. He inhabits Rochester’s edgy defensive pride, so easily assumed as scorn. Yet his Rochester is clearly redemptive.

As Bessie the tough-tender maid to Mrs Reed, Katie Ford adds to several recent roles where she keeps impressing. Her Grace Poole is appropriately stony, her Blanche Ingram haughtier than ever and even hoity (her blissfully parlour duet with Bentley in character); and she’s Diana Rivers. Diana’s one of the cousins Jane didn’t know she had (and nor do we unless we know the book or every other adaptation). As Diana she can radiate natural warmth.

In this Ford’s twinned with Evie McGuire’s joyous sister Mary Rivers, though apart from maid Abigail (also twinned with Ford’s Bessie) McGuire enjoys striking contrasts. As the seraphic almost too-good Helen Burns, the schoolgirl who befriends Jane, she’s unworldly and deeply affecting as she falls asleep forever, walking up through the audience. Moments later though she explodes on her return as Adele, Rochester’s ward, the French girl jabbering French and pirouetting through the play. It’s a neat moment of stage business and costume-change in BOAT’s small tech hut behind the audience. McGuire’s Adele is never still, a wild contrast to Helen; a force of nature, only slightly tamed by finally reading a book.  McGuire now lights up the BOAT stage even more than she did the BLT; and even alone is distinguished.

There’s strong performances from Cathy Byrne, who’s worked with Sheridan’s Identity Theatre (usually a larger ensemble) but here making her BLT debut. She frosts up the forbidding Mrs Reed in black, spitting out malediction to the end. Indeed you wonder why Jane, usually so forthright can’t summon up a little more riposte at the end. As Mrs Fairfax, more white-dressed, Byrne’s all care and warning, occasionally hard-talking and home-truthing (incredulous that Rochester has chosen Jane, yet also anxious).

Steven Adams, responsible for the set and much else, burls through a thoroughly unpleasant tyrant of a Mr Brocklehurst, whom you feel has killed Helen Burns and others through sheer callous neglect. As Lord Ingram he’s all deluded bluster for his daughter the haughty Blanche; a blathery Clergyman about to conduct a marriage. And finally as St John Rivers, exuding the man’s lack of feeling for Jane in a way Teale brings out uniquely.

It isn’t that Jane doesn’t feel she can love St John, so much as she knows he could never be attached to her; and she would be drawn irresistibly to him and be shut out. Which induces a more ambivalent crisis, with less predictable outcome. It’s here too that the voice calling Jane back is suddenly amplified through Bentley, Jones and others: a striking moment as they tug at Boreham.

And Rosalind Caldwell’s Pilot the dog is something else: fluent in puppetry – she also floats a giant dragonfly – her stagecraft is both affecting and would be stage-stealing if Caldwell wasn’t so consummate in dissolving herself to the action. At BOAT though she can lollop with abandon.

Liz Ryder-Weldon’s music and sound design (again with Hannah Sumner) corrals late Beethoven string quartets (the Op 132 on his own illness, with the dying Helen Burns), Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, Fauré’s ‘Apres un Reve’ (again appositely chosen, since it’s troubled dreams after Bertha’s fire-raising) and two mildly modern string pieces for nightmares and a burst of ostinato from Stravinsky’s Octet.

The costumes especially dresses by Colin Rogers-Marsh and Myles Locke are equally striking: no more so than the contrast of Janes Eyre’s tight pale blue with Mason’s plunging scarlet. There’s special props like Ed Berridge’s dragonfly, certainly a singular addition of Teale’s, teasing out a theme.

There’s other fine effects: stage smoke, use of candles and light filter to mimic fire and BOAT lighting sequences precisely, adapted by Beverley Grover from her BLT lighting design. Most of all though this is a heart-stopping production. The sinewy and sensuous storytelling, the new elements as Jane and Bertha encircle each other, take the strange to the eerie: a sisterhood of repressed desire released into another life, a doppelganger where one must die. It’s Bertha’s tragedy as well as Jane’s triumph.

Teale has released the daemons, but Sheridan’s ensemble has delivered Jane Eyre’s feeling to a pitch remarkable even for BLT and BLT and BOAT. Boreham and Bentley are overwhelming.

At BLT my companion had said simply. “This is so much better than most of West End rubbish I see. Can’t it go beyond BOAT?” Still, despite rain earlier, it has reached a twilight and sunny consummation at BOAT. And it’s even more outstanding.

Stage Manager Charlotte Atkinson, Properties Vicky Horder, Lighting and Sound Operation Tina Sitko, Costumes Colin Rogers-Marsh, Myles Locke, Dragonfly Design and Build Ed Berridge, Photography Miles Davies. Design Holly Everett.

Special thanks to Stanmer House, Paul Sheridan, Joanna Ackroyd, Pearl and all staff and volunteers at BOAT.

Published June 14, 2026June 14, 2026 by Simon Jenner