THIS year’s Bard In The Botanics (BiB) mini-festival has opened with two classical texts that are not by the Bard of Stratford; namely, the outstanding production of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler currently playing in the beautiful Kibble Palace glasshouse, and this outdoor adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s much-loved novel Jane Eyre.

Shakespeare fans take note, the programme turns its attention to the English bard next month with stagings of Measure For Measure and an adaptation humorously renamed The Merry Wives Of Wishaw.

Outdoor summer theatre in Glasgow is a bit like a game of Russian roulette (albeit that there is more than one full chamber marked ­“rainstorm”). During the performance of ­director-adapter Jennifer Dick’s new version of Jane Eyre last Tuesday rain didn’t stop play, but it did force the unfortunate audience to take ­refuge within raincoats and under ­umbrellas.

Indeed, even before the inclement weather had made its unwelcome presence felt, Dick’s production had begun with a humorous ­reference to the bravery-cum-foolhardiness of Scottish outdoor theatre.

The play – which resets Brontë’s story from northern England to South Lanarkshire and Perthshire – begins with the cast members ­arriving onstage shaking their umbrellas of, in this case, fictional Scottish rain.

Alan Steele as Brocklehurst

The vagaries of the Caledonian climate are not the only difficulty with which the cast has to contend. The quality of the work at Bard In The Botanics is generally more than high enough to justify significantly increased levels of ­funding (not least from the nation’s ­principal arts ­funding organisation Creative Scotland, which does not support BiB at all).

This production – which is performed in front of the backdrop of a generic Scottish landscape painting – creaks a little in designer Heather Grace Currie’s simple, broadly 20th-century creations.

In part this is due to a number of ­actors ­playing multiple characters (for instance, there’s little narrative sense in the arch-moralist Mr Brocklehurst – portrayed by the ever-excellent Alan Steele – wearing turned-up jeans).

A number of director Dick’s staging ideas don’t set the heather alight either.

The decision to have the six-strong cast on or near the stage most of the time leads, ­distractingly, to actors standing around ­pointlessly or, worse, turning their backs to the audience as an indication that their character has, in fact, left the scene.

Johnny Panchaud as Mr Rochester

Then there is the attempt to add some ­atmosphere by way of vocal effects (particularly the disturbed laughter of Rochester’s famously confined wife Bertha Mason) conveyed live via microphones. Modish this may be, but here it is repetitive and ineffective.

The representation of the immolation of Thornfield Hall by way of a moment of ­interpretive dance is mercifully short.

All of which is a great pity because, at its ­dramatic bones, this is a very decent ­rendering of the novel. Dick’s adaptation is crisp and meaningful, while Stephanie McGregor’s Jane is compellingly spirited and sympathetic.

Johnny Panchaud is, simultaneously, ­broodingly fascinating and painfully conflicted as Rochester. The pair are backed by a strong supporting cast in a well-acted, nicely adapted, but unevenly directed production.

Until July 6: bardinthebotanics.co.uk