UK Theatre Network

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, nor ought to be.

Shared Experience have been instrumental in pioneering a distinctive performance style celebrating the union of physical and text-based theatre. Sadly, this innovative theatre company that has been responsible for such brilliant productions as War and Peace and The Caucasian Chalk Circle has recently lost all of its Arts Council funding.

Brontë was originally written and directed by Polly Teale in 2005. This new production, directed by Nancy Meckler, is a collaboration with the Watermill Theatre. Polly Teale explores in her intriguing play how it was possible that the Brontës, three celibate Victorian sisters, living in isolation on the Yorkshire Moors, could have written some of the most passionate fiction of all time creating such potent psychological portraits that they would become a part of our collective consciousness.

Three female actors in modern dress are already on stage as the audience are taking their seats. As the show begins they discuss the Brontë sisters and imagine themselves living their reality when women were kept like “overgrown infants in the nursery of life.” As they put on their costumes they slowly change into their characters. Their brother Branwell is coming home – a failure once again. All their hopes to escape from poverty and obscurity are squashed.  Nobody expects anything of women, they live in obscurity, while Branwell is crushed under the burden of their expectations and becomes an alcoholic - the only legacy of this once imaginative boy who lacked the talent of his sisters remains his famous portrait displaying the three novelists.

This is not a biographical play. Shared Experience take us through an emotional journey of discovery. Polly Teale mixes fictional and real characters onstage to show the inner lives of Emily and Charlotte. There is no character displaying Anne’s inner life because she considered her writing a tool to provoke reform and expose injustice. The fictional character Cathy of Wuthering Heights is alive in Emily’s imagination as she conjures her up to write. Cathy is an embodiment of Emily’s longing to return to the free state of childhood, to be a girl again. The madwoman, Rochester’s Creole wife of Jane Eyre, is an expression of Charlotte’s passions, she embodies everything Charlotte wishes to disown and conceal from others. In the second half, Jane Eyre emerges as an idealised version of Charlotte whereas the madwoman remains everything that she, the Victorian woman, is not allowed to be.

The ensemble is excellent. Elizabeth Crarer convincingly shows Emily's shy but rebellious nature and her desire to be outside, not to be known; Kristin Atherton's Charlotte, the only sibling to marry although she was considered plain – “she learnt her market value at the age of twelve” - manages to retain our sympathy even at her most domineering when she edits her dead sisters' works; and Flora Nicholson gives a touching performance as Anne, who despite seeming a gentle and conventional woman wrote an account of domestic violence that shocked Victorian critics. Mark Edel-Hunt is very good as Branwell. Stephen Finegold is an authoritative Patrick Brontë and touching as the bumbling, good hearted Arthur Bell Nichols. France McNamee vividly conveys the wild, passionate nature of both Cathy and the madwoman.

Until 14 May 2011, 7.45 pm.
Richmond Theatre
The Green, Richmond, Surrey
TW9 1QJ
http://www.ambassadortickets.com/2244/659/Richmond/Richmond-Theatre/Bronte-Tickets

Then touring:

Theatre Royal Bath
17 - 21 May
Box Office 01225 448 844
 

West Yorkshire Playhouse
24 - 28 May
Box Office 01132 137 700
 

Glasgow Citizens Theatre
1 - 4 Jun
Box Office 0141 429 0022