IF YOU want a straightforward version of Jane Eyre, perhaps with picturesque Merchant Ivory effects, then Polly Teale’s production for Shared Experience isn’t for you.

But if you think it legitimate for an adapter to pry into a text, you will find nothing bolder or more imaginative than a staging that is as much an investigation of the mind of Charlotte Brontë and her governess-heroine as a potent retelling of a terrific tale.

Apart from the inevitable recasting, nothing has noticeably changed since Teale staged Jane Eyre, first at the Young Vic and then in the West End, in the late 1990s; but then nothing needs to change. There is the same broken staircase leading to the same attic in which Mr Rochester has hidden his mad, raging wife, Bertha.

And again it’s clear that she’s not only a fearsome character in her own right, but represents the repressed id of a protagonist who has been taught a spurious calm by the hard school of Victorian life.

Myriam Acharki’s Bertha occasionally emerges to tug at the skirts or to wrap herself round the body of Monica Dolan’s Jane, but mostly she’s stuck in her jagged eyrie, writhing and wailing, screeching and banging at moments of special emotion. But this doesn’t mean that Dolan herself must become totally mask-like when her innards are smouldering in the presence of James Clyde’s wild, raffish Rochester. Her cheeks twitch, her eyes pucker and squint, her hands nervously scratch at her face or knead each other. Again and again you see the stress of a woman who has, in effect, locked fierce and fiery passions in her personal attic to survive.

Does Teale somewhat labour the point? Well, there were moments of such emotional pressure that both Bertha and Jane looked as if they themselves might go into labour. But that would be a serious objection only if the result were to sully or distort the narrative. As it is, the Shared Experience style — pacy, informal, inventive, physically expressive — keeps you gripped by what’s still Jane Eyre. It remains Brontë’s story of the orphan who becomes a governess and a governess who, after a little misunderstanding at the altar, ends up with — but please read the novel or go to Trafalgar Studios or, better, do both.

Again, it’s typical of Shared Experience that only eight actors achieve all this and typical, too, that Dolan is as unsentimentally treated as she could be. Would Clyde’s Rochester really want to marry a starchy, doughty Jane whose psychological wounds and lack of self-esteem are so evident? Well, I fully believed he would.

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