Watching Polly Teale's bold and expressionistic exploration of the novelist Jean Rhys's life, After Mrs Rochester, feels like being caught in the eye of a storm.
Critically well received when it toured the country, its breathtaking experimentalism is even more striking in the West End as it dives into the turbulent mind of a woman who created a feminist classic when she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, yet whose life revealed disturbing parallels with its subject - the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre.
In a theatrical year where two major adaptations of novels - Midnight's Children and Camille (from La Dame aux Camelias) - have proved critically disappointing, the Shared Experience Theatre Company continues to demonstrate an enviable facility for taking risks with literature that make it spring intelligently off the page.
True, this is a piece of theatre about a novelist rather than a novel, yet its polyphonic blending of biography, fictional text and images of frustrated desire creates a captivating echo chamber between Rhys's life and that
of the Caribbean-born character who became immortalised as Charlotte Bronte's mad woman in the attic.
Diana Quick powerfully evokes the ravaged alcoholic desolation of a writer whose memories flicker with haunted happiness and guilty pleasures. Constantly on stage as the older Rhys, she looks back on her life from its conflicted beginnings in Dominica, and at a younger self played with luminous intensity by an extraordinary Madeleine Potter.
Potter can switch from naif to seductress, or from shy charmer to overbearing Valkyrie in seconds. And Sarah Ball's snarling, dishevelled Mrs Rochester embodies the third self with Freudian vigour - an inchoate suppressed anger that links the rebellious girl and the alcoholic woman.
On Angela Davies's metaphorical set, a large wardrobe lurks as if it is hiding someone's subconscious, and piles of suitcases reflect Rhys's essentially nomadic spirit. Amy Marston excels as Rhys's starchily competent daughter, and as a pristine Jane Eyre - a comically efficient counterpoint to the atmosphere of turbulent despair.
For indisputably this is a tale of sound and fury. And its significance is the triumphant resurrection of one of the 20th century's most fascinating female novelists.
Booking to 6 September. Box office: 020 7369 1791.
After Mrs Rochester
