March 29, 2011
Considering the Brontë sisters’ lives were devoid of much ‘living’ as such, it is astonishing how much vitality Polly Teale extracts from the story of the family in the new run of her play Brontë, which has started at the Oxford Playhouse this week.
The play examines the rise of the three sisters, and the fall of their idolised brother Bramwell, played against a backdrop of industrial revolution and social upheaval, but set within the domestic space of their home at the Parsonage at Haworth.
The play may be set almost entirely in one room, but all life is here. Sibling rivalry, repressed passions, a desperate desire for life, but without the means. Anne says she writes to “turn life into words”, but the other two sisters find life from their words. Their soaring, intensely-felt inner lives become real through the characters they create, as fictional and real characters are mixed onstage. The play powerfully merges their novels with their lives: the passionate Bertha Rochester bubbling beneath the surface of staid Charlotte; the wild and elemental Cathy that Emily longs to be, mouthing along with her own words as she watches her creations take life in front of her.
All of the cast embody their parts perfectly. Emily is the most sympathetic sister – a free spirit who writes in order to exist, not in order to be known. Charlotte is the ambitious one, the one who recognises Emily’s talent but cannot bear to acknowledge it; who baulks at the thought that the world might think that she wrote such unhinged, uncouth subject matter. But though she is the colder, more aloof and business-like sister, her loneliness at the end is heartbreaking.
Perhaps I would have been moved anyway. The story of, and stories by, the Brontës are devastatingly powerful on their own. But the way the two are weaved together here is masterfully and beautifully done. At the end, Charlotte writes that she has finally managed to find contentment in the ordinary. This play is far from ordinary.
The play examines the rise of the three sisters, and the fall of their idolised brother Bramwell, played against a backdrop of industrial revolution and social upheaval, but set within the domestic space of their home at the Parsonage at Haworth.
The play may be set almost entirely in one room, but all life is here. Sibling rivalry, repressed passions, a desperate desire for life, but without the means. Anne says she writes to “turn life into words”, but the other two sisters find life from their words. Their soaring, intensely-felt inner lives become real through the characters they create, as fictional and real characters are mixed onstage. The play powerfully merges their novels with their lives: the passionate Bertha Rochester bubbling beneath the surface of staid Charlotte; the wild and elemental Cathy that Emily longs to be, mouthing along with her own words as she watches her creations take life in front of her.
All of the cast embody their parts perfectly. Emily is the most sympathetic sister – a free spirit who writes in order to exist, not in order to be known. Charlotte is the ambitious one, the one who recognises Emily’s talent but cannot bear to acknowledge it; who baulks at the thought that the world might think that she wrote such unhinged, uncouth subject matter. But though she is the colder, more aloof and business-like sister, her loneliness at the end is heartbreaking.
Perhaps I would have been moved anyway. The story of, and stories by, the Brontës are devastatingly powerful on their own. But the way the two are weaved together here is masterfully and beautifully done. At the end, Charlotte writes that she has finally managed to find contentment in the ordinary. This play is far from ordinary.