Preview | Jane Eyre at the Arcola Theatre

This summer, John Joubert’s final opera is fully staged for the first time. Director Eleanor Burke tells us how memory, music, and sustainability converge in a radical reimagining of Brontë’s classic – and how a labour of love finally reaches the stage

For decades, John Joubert’s opera Jane Eyre sat in relative obscurity – completed over ten years in the 1980s and premiered in concert in 2016, it was a labour of love born not from commission but from deep personal passion. A South African-born British composer, Joubert was best known for his choral music, though his operatic output – of which Jane Eyre was the eighth – remains substantial for a post-war British composer. He died in 2019 at the age of 91 Now, for the first time, the opera comes to the stage in a fully realised production at the Arcola Theatre as part of this year’s Grimeborn Festival. Directed by Eleanor Burke for Green Opera, this long-awaited staging is as much about creative resurrection as it is about radical reinterpretation....

[for the full article, visit www.gramophone.co.uk]