'After Mrs. Rochester' plays at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona.
Title: After Mrs Rochester
Writer: Polly Teale
Directed by Brian Heap
Mad Bertha is rolled in a ball with her hair over her face and bandages on her arms and legs. She laughs, howls, grumbles, rages, and talks back in a ripe white West Indian creole. For two hours she is present onstage, the conscience of the play and the deep-seated primal consciousness of the Jean Rhys character whose story the play is unfolding. The mature Rhys (Hilary Nicholson), slightly out of control and yearning for clarity, is also onstage for the entire performance. The young Rhys, called by her birth name Ella (Maylynne Walton), is driven by a demonic energy to expose the roots of her character from battles with a prissy and unloving mother, played by Veronica Salter, through episodes of failed romance (with multiple characters played by Rooney Chambers and Karl Williams, with Jean-Paul Menou contributing to the mix of angst and desire) to the point where Rhys, finally a professional writer, comes to grips with her own submerged Bertha and begins to write her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea. The play is set in Devon, in a cottage in the remote English countryside in 1957, the year that Rhys was rediscovered by the world after having been thought dead for twenty years.
Imagination
Jean Rhys is one of the West Indies' most distinguished literary personalities. After Mrs. Rochester is an extremely clever pastiche that draws on Rhys's fiction, her letters and other non-fiction artefacts, and lots of imagination to construct a history for this writer that is paralleled by the history that Rhys is constructing for mad Bertha, the first Mrs Rochester. Rhys's obsession with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is well depicted on the stage with many moments of complete absorption in the received text and many segments of quotations from Rhys's 'answering back' text. The little girl Tia becomes Tite in Teale's play, a composite figure drawing on the black women in Rhys's life, and Meta, the terrifying Nanny, also becomes a composite of several black female characters in the novels and in Rhys's unfinished autobiography Smile Please. These figures lend energy and contrast to the white models that are present for the young Rhys - her mother, the nuns in the convent where Rhys is sent to learn white values, and the characters in the novels Rhys is incessantly reading, first and foremost being Jane Eyre.
The young Rhys is a wild amalgam of personalities taken from her autobiography and her two West Indian novels, Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark. She communicates with the mature Rhys over the space taken up on the stage by mad Bertha, and she comes to maturity with a conviction that she is damaged somehow because of her mother's rejection of her and also because of 'Mr. Howard'. This character, well played by Jean-Paul Menou, is taken from hints in Rhys' diaries. He is a family friend, built up into an uncle in the play, who sexually abuses the young Rhys, though not to the degree of physicality shown in the play. Mr. Howard spoke sex to Rhys and so poisoned her innocence. She became, in the words of the wife of Ford Madox Ford, 'not wife material'.
Passion for clothes
Brian Heap has created a great open set that gets strewn with the detritus and mess of Rhys' life as the play proceeds. Rhys had a passion for clothes and we see this borne out as she undergoes changes from schoolgirl to chorus girl to kept woman to writer. The men in the play are also carefully and cleverly permutated by having the same actor play dual or even triple roles. Rhys' doting father, Rees Williams, a doctor, played by Rooney Chambers, becomes the boyfriend in her first passionate affair (with Lancelot Smith), while the Rochester character of Jane Eyre, played by Karl Williams, also plays Ford Madox Ford. Ford was Rhys' mentor at the beginning of her career as a professional writer. He involved her in a bizarre ménage à trois with himself and his wife, Stella Bowen, at a time when she was vulnerable since her husband, the journalist, Jean Lenglet, was serving time for fraud. Rhys was desperate for a man to solve her life. The play shows us several lovers and two husbands. Rhys in fact had three husbands, for after divorcing Lenglet, she married her agent Leslie Tilden-Smith, and then Tilden-Smith's cousin, Max Hamer, who also spent time in jail before dying of a heart attack. The elisions and compression work well in After Mrs. Rochester. We are well acquainted with Rhys' dependencies and passions by the time she is matured and do not need to see the details of her life further depicted.
The weaving of story is cleverly done. We have fiction woven with fact and presented with a great wave of energy that takes the actors around the big open stage and throws them on their knees (and brings Jean Rhys to her knees in front of whichever man she is currently involved with). Maryvonne, Rhys' daughter, is the voice of the outside world knocking on the cottage door, but Rhys is shown to be wholly absorbed in the creative moment that involves sorting past and present and straining these memories through the soul of mad Bertha. When Rhys finally admits Maryvonne into her cottage and her life, it is because she has found a way to pull all the parts of herself together and is able to sit and write her masterpiece, giving mad Bertha a voice and a history of her own. She is able to admit the 'real world' and to benefit from its ordering tendencies. She has voyaged to a place where her own weaving can be done.
Brian Heap's wonderful depiction of relationships is accomplished through this back-and-forth presentation of personas and events. He has grasped the significance of deep motivation and pain in Rhys' life and presents it to the audience with drama and passion. The actors are alive in their roles; they are enjoying every moment of this harrowing drama that is unfolding. Maylynne Walton depicts the changing segments of Rhys' life, from childhood to mature writer, with energy and intelligence, while Hilary Nicholson is so natural in the part of the mature Rhys that she sometimes seems to absorb the real Rhys according to photographs that exist of her. Nadia Khan is brilliant as the mad Bertha who grovels and grizzles and howls and only shows her face at the end, once Rhys has arrived at articulation of her being in beginning to write Wide Sargasso Sea.
The male actors are superb as they try to fathom the impenetrable pain that characterizes Jean Rhys at various stages of her life. They compress the arc of relationships into a few moments of interaction. Rhys would have been appalled at the apparent ease with which material from her texts of creative fiction are melded with that from her non-fiction. The role of her mother and the Mr. Howard character are examples of this, and the story of her early adult life in England, taken from Voyage in the Dark, is another. Yet the play works smoothly and tells the tale of her fall into prostitution with a light touch. She works her way out of it by learning to write as a professional under the tutelage of Ford Madox Ford, and she saves herself from further affairs by her marriage to Tilden-Smith.
Polly Teale has done a brilliant pastiche of Jean Rhys' life and Brian Heap has presented it with energy and grace to a mesmerized audience. Without some knowledge of Rhys and her work, it may be difficult to follow some parts of this play, and to take it as gospel is also a pitfall. But for a thoroughly challenging and satisfying evening's performance at the theatre it would be hard to find better. Hats off to all involved in this production. It is a wild ride, and a wonderful dramatic piece.
'After Mrs. Rochester' plays for the last time this weekend at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts. Call 927-1047 or 927-1456 for information.
- Mary Hanna
