GOOD Company are most welcome company at the Grand Opera House, where serious and indeed seriously good drama struggles for air, squeezed out by chipper musicals, tribute cheese and yesterday's pop acts seeking one more day in the sun.

There is an additional factor: the dearth of high-quality touring theatre companies performing the classics. Thankfully, Good Company are one such practitioner, and in their 17 years they have brought the works of Dickens and in particular Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters to the provinces with vision, vim and integrity.

Last September, they made merry with Austen's match-making Emma, with Brian Deacon as the dashing Mr Knightly, and now he returns as another of those literary characters with the formal Mr to their name: Mr Rochester.

There have been Jane Eyre adaptations where Mr Rochester has taken on the role of narrator, slowing up the dramatic flow and muddying the waters. Not so here. Director Sue Pomeroy's stage adaptation is a fully rounded drama where dialogue takes on the story-telling role and music links the often short, episodic scenes.

Shared Experience turned Jane Eyre into a psychological drama that presented the raving, vengeful, sensual Bertha in the attic as the secret self of the pallid, restrained Jane. No such entwining or mirrored movements here: EastEnders and Crossroads soap star Clare Wilkie enters alone in black, on a stage with the shape of the cross lit on the floor. This is very much a solo journey for 'poor, obscure and plain' Jane, Victorian martyr .

Wilkie may be best known for her soaps but period drama fits her like a glove: she has the face and gait for Jane, and although not strictly plain she is pale and dowdy but with inner steel. Deacon's Mr Rochester is initially as chilled and bleak as his Thornfield house, a skeletal place with shredded shrouds and sparse, austere furniture in Dennis Saunders' set design.

Gradually, inexorably, the bounds of Victorian repression are loosened and broken, amid the gothic horror story of mad, screaming, pyromaniac woman upstairs, with Jules Deering's empathetic lighting adding its own commentary throughout.

Saunders' open-plan set plays all four locations, just one example of multiple role here, along with Pomeroy's chameleon supporting cast in which Lynden Edwards and Tryphena Edwards are particularly impressive.

Classical rather than radical, this soulful production is Jane Eyre at its most Victorian melodramatic.

Updated: 13:30 Wednesday, July 02, 2003