Jean Rhys is best known for her novel The Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of the first Mrs Rochester who ends up as a mad woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys was fascinated with this underdeveloped character from an early age in part because she herself had a similar background. Born in Dominica she was a white Creole who was torn between feeling advantaged on the one hand and on the other being derided for being a 'white nigger'. 
      Polly Teale's play, After Mrs Rochester is a wonderful examination of Jean Rhys's life, her struggle for identity and the demons who tormented her, whether real, like her mother and the men who loved and then abandoned her, or imagined, as in her characters, Mrs Rochester in particular. 
      Diana Quick is the older Rhys, locked in her room and refusing to open the door to her daughter, glugging gin from the bottle and reliving her past, while Mrs Rochester is an ever-present being, almost becoming one with Rhys at times. Madeleine Potter plays the younger Rhys full of fire and spirit trying to make sense of her life and finally at quite a late stage learning to cope by writing about it. Both women are excellent, playing off one another and remaining at the same time two parts of a whole. Towards the end the older Rhys says to the younger, 'When you've written it, it doesn't hurt anymore.' If only we all had our older selves to advise us in our youth! 
      The locked room is a beautiful metaphor for Rhys's mind, the characters from her past, including Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, appearing and disappearing as her life unwinds before us. She cannot escape them and at the same time she could not live without them. She refuses to let her daughter enter, mirroring her incapability of being a mother to her. Having given her up as a baby she tried when she was eight to develop a relationship but failed miserably. And yet her daughter is here, begging to be let in and in the final moments of the play, having in a sense dealt with her demons, Rhys does open the door to her. 
     Syan Blake and Amy Marston stand out in a cast where the acting is universally good, both playing numerous characters. They are particularly effective as Rhys's childhood friend and her daughter respectively. Rhys says of Tite, her friend from the West Indies, that she never saw her sad and Blake effortlessly conveys a spirit full of adventure and cheekiness. Marston, whether playing an eight-year-old, Jane Eyre, or a snooty shop assistant, is a delight to watch.
      There are some brilliant moments such as when we see Jane Eyre's Mrs Rochester attacking her husband, while Jane looks on and at the same time the young Rhys attacking her lover who is about to leave her as Diana Quick observes all from the back, in control of chaos. The magical thing is that none of it is confusing or inappropriate. When Rhys's daughter is finally let in the room she asks her mother whether she would have preferred to have been happy or to have been a writer. The question doesn't need an answer - she had no choice. And Polly Teale's play is a fitting tribute to this tortured but hugely talented woman.
Francine Brody