Villette at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

reviewed for The Times, 6 October 2016

In an episode of Friends, Jennifer Aniston’s character, Rachel, attends an adult education class on Jane Eyre. She hasn’t done the homework, so her friend Phoebe fools her into believing that Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a futuristic tale about a cyborg. “It’s so ahead of its time,” Rachel blags to her teacher. “The feminism?” “Yes, but also the robots.”

In the latest instalment of its Brontë season, the West Yorkshire Playhouse appears to have given Brontë’s later novel, Villette, the Rachel treatment. No longer is Lucy Snowe a gently impoverished schoolteacher, wasting her youth in a Belgian pensionnat. Instead she is a clone, or as wary humans insist, “a descendant”. There are shades of Blade Runner.

Raised in a lab to process data, our heroine works at an archaeological dig, seeking historical clues to a virus ravaging the world. Where Brontë’s Lucy was haunted by the ghost of a nun, the new version is excavating a convent, committed to finding the bones of the last known woman with natural immunity to this epidemic.

What the playwright Linda Marshall-Griffiths has grasped effectively is that Villette is the story of an outsider. In her reimagining, strangers expect as little emotion from Laura Elsworthy’s Lucy as from a robot — or a well-trained 19th-century governess. Yet Lucy, like her literary ancestor, is flesh, blood and passion: “I love. I hate. I suffer.”

What Marshall-Griffiths can’t capture is the novel’s rich, long-form characterisation. Though Elsworthy recites Lucy’s most famous inner monologues — breathily amplified above her natural sound levels — those around her are less richly drawn, especially the red herring love interest, John (played by Nana Amoo-Gottfried). Instead, it’s all sci-fi, no substance. Catherine Cusack, an actress capable of much more, draws the shortest straw, stalking around the stage as Lucy’s sterile, bitter cliché of an old boss, Professor Beck. The feminist consistency of the script is limited.