Crazy Jane
Tron, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
THREE STARS
Even if you don't know her by name, you've probably seen Jane Avril - marmalade hair, pale face, black-stockinged legs high-kicking up froths of petticoats in Toulouse-Lautrec's iconic Moulin Rouge posters. She's now the Crazy Jane at the heart of this new production by Birds of Paradise, written by Nicola McCartney, directed by Garry Robson, with music by Scottish hip hop artists Hector Bizark. Crazy? Who knows what brought on the tics, the jerking, the spasms, that saw the young Jane cooped up in the Salpetriere Asylum, diagnosed with Sydenham's chorea - but tagged as an "hysteric" by its director.
Jane's rise to stardom in Belle Epoque Paris is, in itself, a tremendous rallying cry against the undermining stigma of mental illness, but her friendship with the disabled artist Toulouse-Lautrec introduces another strand to Jane's confrontation with adversity.
For while she emerged from a background of poverty and abuse, he was born into a rich aristocratic family - and while she channeled her infirmities into her success as a dancer, he drank himself into a self-loathing that decried his talents even more savagely than his dismissive critics.
All this amounts to a vast and sprawling canvas. Compressing it into a couple of hours - with a back-and-forth timeline, much doubling of roles by the cast, George Drennan in particular, and a very busy backdrop of projected images and subtitles - makes the first half feel very congested: long on detail but somehow short on a real engagement with the characters. The second half is altogether stronger. Rachel Drazek (Young Jane) and Pauline Knowles (Jane Avril) have more room to breathe, to dance, to convey the inner resolve and dignity of a vulnerable woman caught up in a mad world not of her choosing.
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