Jane meeting Rochester at Thornfield Hall could start a dark drama like Sondheim’s Passion, which Gordon’s score often seems to be struggling to get out of its head.

LIKE ARCADE slot machines, theatrical schedules occasionally throw up fruitful coincidences. In this case, two mid nineteenth-century works, published in redacted form due to societal restrictions. Jane Eyre was published in 1847 under the alias Currer Bell, only the initials of the writer, Charlotte Brontë, surviving at a time when it was easier to be published if you were male than female. A year later, in Russia, Ivan Turgenev started writing a play that underwent retitling – from The Student to A Month in the Country – and rewriting before the Russian state censor passed it for publication in 1855 and eventual staging 17 years later.

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