“What is your favourite Brontë novel?” asks Gemma Whelan’s Charlotte Brontë of various men in the audience, as she sweeps through the Dorfman pit to the centre of the onstage wild moorland.
She speaks today’s English, complete with expletives, and what seems an awareness of today’s world and says this isn’t going to be about her (though of course it is) but about youngest sister Anne. She is the underdog and, as becomes clear, Charlotte’s self-importance and jealousy have been hugely responsible for Anne being put in the shadow: by preventing the reprinting of her hugely successful The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for instance.
Charlotte has hardly taken up her commanding position when the whole moor rises, ascending to become a canopy of tree branches. Sarah Gordon’s play will expose what is under the surface as director Natalie Ibu and designer Grace Smart emphasise. This isn’t a documentary; it’s a lively romp, though at the same time very serious about women’s situation in society, poverty, addiction and illness.
Anne’s dreadful experience as a governess (on which she drew in writing Agnes Grey) is poignantly played by Rhiannon Clements, but simultaneously made funny with an hysterically comic performance by Nick Blakeley as her obnoxious employer, Mrs Ingham. Blakeley is also a cartoonish but sharply observed Mrs Gaskell, Charlotte’s conniving biographer.
Third novelist sister Emily (Adele James) and brother Bramwell (James Phoon) don’t get much of a look-in, but Charlotte seems always in action and rarely stops talking. We catch a brief glimpse of the married French Professor Heger (Julian Moore-Cook); she seems to have fallen for and of publisher George Smith (Moore-Cook again). Charlotte and Anne’s trip to London to see Smith becomes the excuse for a laughter-rich coach journey, though in fact they travelled by train.
What Sarah Gordon delivers is a series of illuminating glimpses into the sisters’ lives plus comment of contemporary relevance to us. It is not the full story, but deceptively satisfying. It makes you look at some things in a new light, but these writers never seem to dip their quill pens in ink. It’s a play, not necessarily history, a lively entertainment that at times seems about to turn into a musical, and it is very enjoyable.