5.+Teale

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 1 discussions ONLY.//
Eileen Curley (Marist College)

=Polly Teale: //After Mrs. Rochester// =



Polly Teale’s After Mrs. Rochester was produced in 2003 by Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale, Artistic Directors of the acclaimed British theatre company Shared Experience, continuing the company’s tradition of presenting adaptations of literary classics. One of three Teale plays that explore the Brontës, After Mrs. Rochester traces the life of Jean Rhys (née Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams) and a fictional version of the writing process for her novel, //The Wide Sargasso Sea//. As the play weaves literary fiction into historically-inspired scenes from Rhys’s life, Jean battles with an hundred and fifty years of proscribed gender roles, but the performance of this accumulated history by Shared Experience necessarily extends the conversation to include contemporary performers and audiences.

Teale’s play continues //The Wide Sargasso Sea//’s intertextual conversation with Jane Eyre, and Bertha Mason figures prominently in all three texts. Gilbert and Gubar argue that in Jane Eyre, Jane’s “confrontation, not with Rochester but with Rochester’s mad wife Bertha, is the book’s central confrontation, an encounter [. . . ] not with her own sexuality but with her own imprisoned ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage,’ a secret dialogue of self and soul on whose outcome [. . . ] the novel’s plot, Rochester’s fate, and Jane’s coming-of-age all depend.”1 Teale’s Ella continues that “secret dialogue,” albeit reluctantly; young Ella complains to older Jean when Bertha has followed her to England: “I don’t want her here. I travelled five thousand miles to get away from her.”2 Later, she would take whichever books the prison guards delivered simply to silence Bertha and inner self: “Anything to shut her out. To shut her up.”3 Jean finally convinces Ella to write, but that writing process results in her physical and mental confinement; in her room, she is tormented by the past until she lets Daughter read her work. In Teale, the struggle with Bertha does not allow for Jane’s coming-of-age, but rather for Jean and Ella’s authorial voice – for the words to free Jean, Ella, Bertha and, by theatrical extension, the women in the audience and on the stage who have inherited the entire legacy.

Shared Experience’s company mission, production techniques and Teale’s script work together to ensure that //After Mrs. Rochester// is indeed an opportunity for all participants in the theatrical event to confront our inherited social roles, literary history and theatrical techniques. Nancy Meckler “suggests that we, as audience members, derive a great benefit from watching performers express those things that we as socialized and constrained adults cannot express in our daily lives.”4 By keeping Daughter nameless and outside Jean’s room until the very end of the play, Teale enables the character to represent all of us – the reading and viewing audiences who, like Daughter, can help to free writers and who still inherited the traditions that Rhys battled and that Shared Experience seeks to highlight in its productions. Thus, by re-conceiving the fiction of Brontë and Rhys, Teale is able to challenge the literary canon as well as traditional views of writing and gender.

Yet, Kristin Crouch notes that despite the seeming attention to texts, the rehearsal techniques used by Shared Experience shift the focus to the performers and the gestural system used throughout the production process.5 A rehearsal process that starts with physicality allows the performers to “develop facility in giving physical shape to a character’s ‘inner life’ – the emotions and hidden, often unconscious desires.”6 This desire to reveal the unspoken life of the characters is particularly relevant for a play such as After Mrs. Rochester, which embodies Teale’s philosophy on the company: “It is this conflict between the outer and inner self which fascinates us and is crucial to the physical life of the work.”7

This rejection of naturalistic rehearsal techniques is accompanied by a rejection of Aristotelian forms. By dispensing with exposition and realistic conventions, Teale supplies information by relying on the audience’s ability to understand physicality and staging. For example, while Ella’s encounter with Lancelot is at first limited by propriety, Bertha can physically embody Ella’s desire: “BERTHA sniffs at Lancelot rubbing her face into his hand. She whines with desire. ELLA sneezes.”8 The interplay of texts and time periods means that throughout, while her grown daughter bangs at the locked attic door, the adult Jean remembers and watches as key moments in her development as a woman and an artist are enacted by her younger self (Ella) and haunted by Bertha. Teale’s deft use of simultaneous staging allows Jean to comment upon Ella’s struggles with repression and expression, while Bertha voices that which Jean and Ella seek to hide and deny. The three stories co-exist on-stage as they do in Jean’s mind and life, and the fluid montage of scenes from Jane Eyre and Rhys’s fictionalized memories simultaneously inhabit the other locations, Jean’s room and Bertha’s attic.

In discussing nineteenth-century women writers who grappled with gendered expectations of the public expression of their creativity, Gilbert and Gubar note that their work “has been strongly marked not only by an obsessive interest in these limited options but also by obsessive imagery of confinement that reveals the ways in which female artists feel trapped and sickened both by suffocating alternatives and by the culture that created them.”9 By crafting a script that allows Jean to confront her literary predecessors, her younger self, her history and her daughter, Teale is able to challenge this cultural inheritance of female writers. The play ends with Jean allowing Daughter into the room, while female figures from her life and fictional history exit the stage through the wardrobe – her literal baggage consuming the earlier and inherited versions of herself, the costumes she wore, and the roles she played. Jean remains finally alone onstage, writing, in the present, no longer haunted by history or literature, while Daughter reads her texts. Freed from confinement, Jean shares her words and story with Daughter – in a performance by a company that also seeks to free audiences, performers and texts from literary, cultural, and naturalistic theatrical history.

1 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, //The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination//, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 339. 2 Polly Teale, //After Mrs. Rochester// (London: Nick Hern Books, 2003), 31. 3 Teale, After Mrs. Rochester, 71. 4 Kristin Crouch, “’Inside Out:’ The Creative Process of Shared Experience Theatre,” //TheatreForum// 26 (Winter/Spring 2005): 77. 5 Crouch, “’Inside Out,’” 77. 6 Crouch, “’Inside Out,’” 78. 7 Crouch, “’Inside Out,’” 76. 8 Teale, //After Mrs. Rochester//, 38. 9 Gilbert and Gubar, //The Madwoman in the Attic//, 64.