The Brontë sisters’ legend gets another going over in this rumbunctious but slender play by Sarah Gordon. It allows them to be not just feminist literary trailblazers martyred to tuberculosis and the patriarchy, but also jealous, competitive and selfish.
Especially Charlotte, who is played with brash charisma and micron-deep self-interest by TV favourite Gemma Whelan. Behind every great woman, she says, are a hundred other great women vying for her hard-won place at the table.
The language is saltily updated – Poet Laureate Robert Southey is dismissed as a “bell end” – and Natalie Ibu’s co-production with Northern Stage, of which she is artistic director, is playful and visually witty.
But the show relies on argument rather than character and it’s short on substance, partly because so little is known about the Brontes beyond their published works.
On one level this is yet another play about how tough it is to be a writer, though this was especially true for three women in the 1840s trapped on a Yorkshire Moor with a vicar father and a wastrel brother.
On another, it’s an imaginative reappraisal and reclamation of the youngest sister, Anne, played with great charm and warmth by Rhiannon Clements.
Anne comes up with the idea of male pseudonyms to enable a collective movement of women writers – “one mask for all” – but Charlotte claims it. Her novel Agnes Grey about working as a governess is emulated and sexed-up by Charlotte in Jane Eyre.
There’s a suggestion that Charlotte stymied Anne in life and after her premature death because she envied her appealing personality and looks as well as her talent.
This is a bracing take, and Gordon makes interesting points about the complex bonds of love and resentment between sisters, and the tendency of female pioneers to pull up the ladder after them.
But in a sort of irony, making the play all about Charlotte’s obsession with Anne involves sidelining Adele James’s Emily Brontë. She’s offstage for large chunks of time and perpetually fuming until her own abrupt death.
It all takes place beneath the grubby roots of a circular, leafy bower, the stage revolve used to great comic effect as characters trudge through Yorkshire gales or take an endless coach ride to London.
There’s lots of direct address to the audience as the ultimate arbiters of the story, and some very clumsy ‘meta’ touches: Charlotte is literally put into a display case in the Haworth parsonage museum at the end. Back in your box, eh?
This is slickly done, knockabout fun which takes on some serious subjects and rightly relegates the men to supporting roles. But ultimately, it doesn’t say much new about the Brontes, gender or jealousy at all.
