“The Sargasso Prisoner” – an opera in progress.
Based on a novel by Jean Rhys (1966). A prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
This Opera gives a voice to Bertha, the “Paper Tiger Lunatic” of Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
The originality of Rhys’ work is to move to the centre stage that which had been relegated to the wings in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: that is, Rochester’s supposedly mad wife, locked away in the attic of his manor.
Reduced to a shadowy, gothic ‘detail’ in Brontë’s Victorian romance, Jean Rhys brings the figure of Bertha to the fore and provides the textual conditions for her emergence as a person. Bertha is thus brought to life as she transforms her inner world into language.