Olivia Marcus and Gabriel Akuwudike will lead the cast of a new touring production of Jane Eyre, directed by 2025 Royal Theatrical Support Trust Sir Peter Hall Director Award winner Lily Dyble.

The production, based on Sally Cookson, Mike Akers and the original company’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, will premiere at Mercury Theatre Colchester from 26 September to 10 October 2026 before touring to Rose Theatre Kingston, Northern Stage in Newcastle and Storyhouse in Chester. (...)

The creative team includes set designer Anna Yates, costume designer Khadija Raza, movement director Natasha Harrison, lighting designer Lucía Sánchez Roldán, composer and sound designer Joseff Harris, fight director Rachid Sabitri, intimacy director Haruka Kuroda and casting director Helena Palmer.

Dyble said: “What is at the very heart of Jane Eyre is courage in the face of the unknown. I’m thrilled to be delivering this story to audiences with bravery and risk, made possible by this phenomenal cast and creative team.” (Alex Wood)

The purple, treeless moors found across Britain’s uplands can look timeless and wild. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë described “the purple moors” as “a wilderness of heath”. Yet these moors have been shaped by clearance, drainage, grazing, pollution and burning.

Peat records from Keighley Moor in West Yorkshire, not far from Brontë country, reveal a longer story. For most of the past 1,000 years, this landscape would have been much wetter, with abundant peat-forming Sphagnum moss, rather than today’s extensive heather-dominated vegetation created through rotational burning. (Joe Glentworth)

Jean Rhys, 136 años después: la escritora que rescató a una mujer recluida en un ático de Jane Eyre.

Se cumplen 136 años de su nacimiento, una efeméride que devuelve la atención a la autora que convirtió a una figura secundaria de la literatura victoriana en protagonista de su propia historia (...)

Sin embargo, su mayor reconocimiento llegó décadas después con Ancho mar de los Sargazos, publicada en 1966, tras un largo periodo apartada de la escena literaria. Un ejemplo de cómo los años de pausa o alejados de la actividad literaria más visible no implican un alejamiento del verdadero oficio del escritor.

La obra dialoga directamente con Jane Eyre, el clásico que Charlotte Brontë publicó en 1847. Rhys recuperó a Bertha Mason, la esposa criolla de Rochester recluida en el ático, y reconstruyó su historia como Antoinette Cosway. El cambio de perspectiva permite abordar el pasado colonial caribeño, la identidad y las relaciones de poder que atraviesan al personaje. (Carmen Tomàs) (Translation)

Jane Eyre

Enero tiene algo de comienzo. Después de las fiestas, muchas personas sienten la necesidad de ordenar su vida, cerrar ciclos y pensar qué quieren hacer diferente durante el nuevo año. Por eso, Jane Eyre puede ser una lectura especialmente atractiva para inaugurar el calendario.

La novela de Charlotte Brontë sigue a Jane, una joven que atraviesa pérdidas, dificultades y relaciones complejas mientras intenta construir una vida en la que pueda conservar su independencia y dignidad. No es solamente una historia de amor: también habla de identidad, autonomía y de la búsqueda de un lugar propio. 

Es un libro ideal para quien quiere empezar el año con una historia intensa y clásica, pero que todavía puede sentirse sorprendentemente moderna en sus preguntas sobre libertad y decisiones personales.

Si naciste en enero, este podría ser tu libro: una historia sobre empezar de nuevo sin renunciar a quién eres. (Ciria Alarcón) (Translation)

Jane Eyre is regarded as one of the great works of English literature. What drew you to Charlotte Brontë’s story?

Isabelle Methven: It’s actually my favourite book.

I’ve loved it for years, so when the opportunity came up to be part of this production, I couldn’t have been more excited. Charlotte Brontë created such rich, truthful characters, and I think that’s why people continue to connect with the story today.

It’s a real privilege to be part of bringing it to life on stage.

Helen Burns and Bessie are very different characters, yet both help shape Jane’s journey. What has it been like exploring those roles?

Isabelle Methven: That’s one of the things I love most about them.

Helen represents kindness, compassion and forgiveness, while Bessie provides warmth and comfort in a very different way. They both leave lasting impressions on Jane, even though they’re with her at different points in her life.

Finding those differences has been one of the most enjoyable parts of rehearsals.

Music is such an important part of storytelling in this production. How do you approach performing songs that carry so much emotion?

Isabelle Methven: For me, singing is really just an extension of acting.

You’re never simply singing a beautiful melody. Every lyric has to come from the character and from what they’re feeling in that moment. If you’re truthful with the emotion, then the music naturally becomes part of the storytelling.

Finally, what do you hope audiences take away from this production?

Isabelle Methven: I hope they leave appreciating just how timeless Jane Eyre really is.

Even though it was written almost two centuries ago, its themes are still incredibly relevant today. It’s a beautiful story, and I hope audiences fall in love with it all over again.

There are other reasons to retell our foundational stories. We may love them as works of art but be enraged by some of their assumptions – sometimes by the entire concept behind them. We return, again and again, but with gritted teeth. We say things like “they’re a product of their time”, and wonder if that’s a good enough excuse.

The retellings that respond to this impulse are some of the classics of the genre. The writers who created them were caught between two impulses: nostalgia and rejection. Jean Rhys admitted as much in describing her response to reading Jane Eyre. She was swept up in it, but “vexed at her portrait of a ‘paper tiger’ lunatic [and] the all-wrong creole scenes”.

Wide Sargasso Sea is Rhys’s modernist prequel to Brontë’s classic. It aims to give justice to the madwoman in the attic, aka English literature’s most famous Creole character. She is a walk-on part in the original, chaotic and exotic. Dominica-born Rhys’s version is both a takedown and a satire of Victorian ideas of empire, race, and morality. Mr. Rochester goes to the colonies to acquire a fortune by marrying a woman he has never met. But he can’t handle the Caribbean. Even the green is too green, the flowers too red, and his new wife’s eyes – he worries they might be too black. (Emily McBride)

The Song of Stork and Dromedary

A Novel

by Anjet Daanje

Translated from the Dutch by David McKay

MacMillan Publishers

ISBN:  9780374620615

August 2026

A thrilling literary puzzle that explores the haunted life and mysterious afterlifes of a writer and her work.

Who was Eliza May Drayden? Is she just the quiet, intensely private person she seems to all the world in her little village of Bridge Fowling in the shadow of the West Yorkshire hills—or is there more to her than meets the eye? It is only after her death that Haeger Mass, her one book—a dark and cryptic novel—assumes a life of its own. In each new chapter of this literary treasure hunt that spans almost three hundred years, we see the conundrum through the eyes of a new generation of characters, each providing competing and interlocking versions of the life—and cursed vision—of this Emily Brontë–like figure. Scholars immerse themselves in the mystery of her life and are led to ruin; the curse that hangs over her comes to visit a young couple; a mysterious diary emerges with her strange and indecipherable poetry and sketches. Elements and symbols repeat in relentless and varying combinations from one story to the next as the years pass: as if the truth at the center of her work is fighting to break free.

The Song of Stork and Dromedary is a philosophical puzzle that unfolds with the exuberance of a historical romp, ingeniously pivoting from Gothic horror to quantum mechanics to memento mori. In this thrilling, recursive tale, Anjet Daanje gets to the frantically beating heart of why we tell stories, and how we try to create meaning with them in a world filled with brutality and death. Daanje has crafted a conundrum that is as diabolical as it is heartbreaking. When we finally open the box that contains the secret behind the life of Eliza May Drayden, what will we see there—a vision of heaven or a vision of hell?

Giving us a Victorian-era Tyra Banks as well as the Brontë sisters, Swoon is a highly impressive and creative feat of physical comedy, with an intelligent throughline that never takes away from the more slapstick and silly elements. The show has a wealth of jokes that rely on the audience having some knowledge of art history, but even without this, the message is clear: ridiculous men with pompous attitudes are forever contributing to the erasure of women. (Arusa Qureshi)

Wuthering Heights 2026

Wuthering Heights (2026) is the most recent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. However, the film garnered a lot of criticism before hitting theaters, with the most prominent being the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, a typically non-white role in the novel.

But that’s not all; there was even more controversy surrounding the film, from the casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine, who was considered too old for the role, to the more sensual direction of the film. Abandoning the themes of the book, it had also been stated that this film was focusing more on the teenage romanticism young readers got when they read the book, which undermined the core values of the story. (Nicholas Brooks)

Wuthering Heights, written by Emily Brontë in 1847, is about the tumultuous love story between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff. It explores themes such as forbidden love, jealousy and even toxic masculinity disguised as passionate love.

For me, the movie was slightly better than the book, though both seem problematic. Heathcliff is driven solely by his lust for Cathy and the jealousy he feels knowing she is with someone else. Each character has their own motives that drive them in their decisions. What I liked about the movie was the stylization of the film, especially Margot Robbie's stunning, though contemporary, looks. Robbie's chemistry with Jacob Elordi's Heathcliff was palpable. The book is more gentle to its characters and readers, but the dark nature of the story remains between both mediums. (Jasmyn Spann)