Three-play review

Ever since it has arrived in London, Brontë has been continually getting reviews. The Theatre section of The Guardian has a three-play review today by Susannah Clapp. Brontë is there too (why would we be reporting it otherwise, eh?). You have to scroll about half the article to get to it, but since it's quite short here it is, the whole thing:

The odds are stacked against a play about the Brontes. Garment-rending and wailing on the moors don't look their best beneath a proscenium arch. Yet Polly Teale, writer and director, succeeds magnificently in her new play Bronte. Using the form she created for her play about Jean Rhys, After Mrs Rochester, she intercuts biographical episodes, both documented and imagined, with passages from the novels.

She suggests that Branwell Bronte's talent was stunted by too much expectation and the fear of failure; that Charlotte was consumed with sexual frustration, and that she brooded jealously over Emily's talent: she is seen burning the fragments of her dead sister's second novel.

Of course, it's risky, all this. It implies that these works of fiction were straight transcriptions from the unconscious. It requires the glorious Natalia Tena to do a lot of writhing as she comes on as, in turn, Wuthering Heights' Cathy and Jane Eyre's mad woman in the attic.

But Tena is well up to seething and snarling, and the romantic idea of the novelists as being possessed by their writing is compellingly conveyed by Diane Beck's desperate, tranced Emily and Fenella Woolgar's turbulent and beady Charlotte.

Huge drawings by Paula Rego dominate the stage, showing the impassioned faces of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte. The women in front of them are pale and vigorous, dressed in dun shades, as if their frocks were made of flint. It's their imaginative lives that have the colour, splashes of blue or red in the midst of a sulphurous light.

We agree that it is risky. The more we read about the the more we see the big leaps Polly Teale takes. Whether or not we agree with what she assumes we have to praise her for being so brave and defying.

Categories: In_the_News, Theatre