A play that 'starts a discussion that can go on long into the night'

It must have been press night recently at the National Theatre for Underdog: The Other Other Brontë and so every website and their (under)dog have published their very own review of it. Make yourself a cup of tea as this is going to be a long but interesting read.

The Times describes it as 'English lit for the Bridgerton generation', giving it 3 stars out of 5:

Sarah Gordon’s hyperactive burlesque rummages through no end of dirty laundry in its portrayal of the Brontës as a collection of bruised egos. Sisterhood goes out of the window as the hyper-ambitious Charlotte, desperate to have her talent acknowledged by the world at large, pushes Emily and Anne aside and discovers that the London literary establishment resembles the in-crowd at the trendiest of London nightclubs.

This frenetic co-production with Northern Stage, overseen by its artistic director Natalie Ibu, throws in lots of effing and blinding along with cheeky meta humour. But even if the enterprise starts to lose momentum after an unnecessary interval — the piece is really a short story posing as a novel — Gemma Whelan’s salty performance always holds your attention. Her no-nonsense Charlotte takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall from the very opening scene and, much as you disapprove of her sharp elbows, you cannot help admiring her wit.

Gordon’s script won the Nick Darke Award in 2020. All the salty language, not to mention the unashamedly anachronistic jokes, put it in the same iconoclastic category as Isobel McArthur’s karaoke-fuelled Jane Austen spoof, Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) as well as Zoe Cooper’s mischievous sapphic rewrite of Northanger Abbey, which is still on tour. (You can catch it in Scarborough and Keswick.)

The focus here is really on Charlotte and Anne. Adele James’s Emily, all flashing eyes and suspicious glances, is soon relegated to the sidelines alongside the doomed, druggy Branwell (James Phoon). Gordon presents us with a Charlotte who is convinced of her own talent and isn’t slow to exercise her merciless sense of judgment: “Belgium’s totally shit anyway,” she declares at one point. By and large, she regards Rhiannon Clements’s Anne, the youngest of them all, as a hopelessly naive scribbler who is to be tolerated rather than encouraged. At the same time, she quite happily borrows ideas from her, much to the saintly Anne’s chagrin.

If Whelan gets most of the best lines, Clements is highly appealing too as an aspiring talent who grows accustomed to having to hide her light under a bushel. Of the multitasking cast of comic male actors, Nick Blakeley stands out, especially for his cross-dressing portrayal of a smarmy Elizabeth Gaskell. We also get a chorus line of smirking, condescending male critics who parade their opinions in a cloud of pipe tobacco smoke. Grace Smart’s costumes make telling use of shades of red, and her set design, incorporating an ever-present revolve, presents a compact expanse of moorland which is hoisted overhead at the start to form a rustic canopy. A stylised glimpse of nature matches Gordon’s fanciful take on a literary legend. (Clive Davis)

3 stars of out of 5 from The Guardian, too.

As a drama about the literary canon’s most famous sisters, Underdog explores the prickly edges of competitive sisterhood, first with a passing jibe at Jane Austen (for making it on to a banknote), then a fuller indictment by Charlotte (Gemma Whelan) who, in scarlet period dress and gen Z boots, tells us: “Young women judge older women more harshly than anybody else … They are conditioned to.”

Sarah Gordon’s play deals with writerly competition between the sisters themselves, although it is Charlotte who is most preoccupied by it. The older sister is a maternal figure to younger Anne (Rhiannon Clements) but also a ruthless rival when Anne’s literary fame risks eclipsing hers, and knifes both sisters strategically while speaking of sorority.

Directed with pace by Natalie Ibu, it is a knowing period-modern mashup, joshing in tone and taking a risk in turning Charlotte into an unlikable, albeit brutally honest, anti-heroine. In fact, this play seems to be more about Charlotte than the “other other” sister of its title. She is its central narrator, and we enter her mind over that of sweet, unassuming Anne and no-nonsense Emily (Adele James) while Branwell (James Phoon), their wayward drunken brother, barely gets a look-in beyond being drunken and wayward.

We hear how she edits Emily’s poetry after her death and prevents a reprint of Anne’s most popular novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, although we also see that beneath this lies great ambition and a firebrand yearning to become as immortal as the likes of Byron.

It certainly raises issues between Charlotte and Anne, but Emily seems little more than a foil to them rather than becoming a part of the competition, despite her magnum opus in Wuthering Heights, which brought its own scandal on publication.

Gordon’s script bounces along, albeit with some glaring modern-day lessons on masculinity and inequality tacked on. It is quick-witted and amusing though it never deepens enough for the emotional punches to land.

The cast is full of fire nonetheless and the exposure of envy and competition beneath the Brontës’ sisterliness is mirrored in the visual metaphor of Grace Smart’s set which consists of a verdant floral mound uprooted at the start to reveal dark matter beneath. (Arifa Akbar)

Also 3 stars out of 5 from The Telegraph:

The National has itself, in recent years, showcased compelling productions of Jane Eyre (Charlotte) and Wuthering Heights (Emily) though it hasn’t touched The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne). One of the questions that Sarah Gordon’s canny, but in my view overly perky, portrait of the siblings might leave you with is whether that omission is the result of artistic merit or a form of in-house marginalisation.

“It’s time I tried to tell the truth... about how one [sister] became an idol and the other became known as the third sister,” declares Gemma Whelan’s captivatingly forthright Charlotte at the start, taking centre-stage in a red dress, boldly conspiratorial and a bit sheepish – “I hope you won’t all judge me too harshly.” 

The contention is that envy was no stranger to the Haworth parsonage and what began as a joint enterprise of attempted female empowerment suffered the schisms of individual ambition.

In terms of novels being accepted for publication, Emily and Anne got there (pseudonymously) first, while Charlotte’s The Professor was rejected. Here, our not-quite-heroine is bluntly aghast – “F--- that!”. And she proceeds to dash off Jane Eyre, and get it published ahead of the other two.

“Must you write her as a governess... when that is the very heart and soul of my book [Agnes Grey]?” Rhiannon Clements’ Anne meekly protests. Gordon further alights on the fact that Charlotte blocked a reprint of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death.

Just what animated that element of reputation control is an interesting debating-point, albeit those most able to assess it are likely to be familiar with the arguments. But to what dramatic end is this “underdog” issue foregrounded (with Emily rather elbowed out of the main frame)? To illustrate that a venerated Brontë can have feet of clay; to allow them all due complexity? The evening ends with an irony: having tried to shape perceptions and counter sensationalism, Charlotte is bundled into a display-case; Brontë “world” becomes a heritage trap.

Gordon commendably crams a lot of information into one eminently (albeit swearily) accessible evening, but it could be said that her potted history falls into that trap, too. 

It’s as if in fearing to make the past dull, it must be brought alive in primary colours. In avoiding the clichés of the Gothic – gloomy days, moaning winds – she errs towards the goonish, with the eclipsed brother Branwell (along with the lordly, gate-keeping publishing domain, incarnated by a cohort of male supporting players) played for contemptuous laughs. 

It’s very stylishly designed by Grace Smart, pacily staged by Natalie Ibu, and winningly played across the board.  I just feel it’s time to let the novels, in all their richness – and we hear precious little of that sublime writing – speak for themselves. (Dominic Cavendish)

3 stars out of 5 from WhatsOnStage, too:

Sarah Gordon’s new play about the Brontë sisters (which won the 2020 Nick Darke Award) is a conundrum. It’s written with passion and wit, yet somehow leaves its subjects diminished. It seeks to introduce new audiences to the power and innovation of the three pioneering novelists who imagined whole worlds from a cloistered Yorkshire parsonage, yet doesn’t quite make the case for their significance. It’s an enjoyable romp but doesn’t peer beneath the surface of its suggestion of a society that holds women writers back.

It begins with Gemma Whelan’s energetically impassioned Charlotte striding through the audience demanding to know which is our favourite Brontë novel. Almost inevitably – though sometimes the men have to be prompted by the women around them to say this – it is her own Jane Eyre, the story of a traduced governess who finds happiness with the darkly mysterious Mr Rochester.

Yet the play’s central thesis builds on more modern scholarship which suggests that Anne, the youngest of the three sisters who died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, is the most radical and that her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, about violence and addiction (and based on the sisters’ own struggles with their brother Branwell) deserves wider attention.

Designer Grace Smart sets the sisters chattering and arguing in a semi-circular cockpit, with wooden walls and a revolve that brings in both furniture and a sequence of hopeless and hapless men, playing many parts, but always holding power. Initially, the scene is covered with the beautiful flora of the moors around their Haworth home; this rises above them as the action starts.

The tone of this co-production with Northern Stage is both jokey and wild, Natalie Ibu’s direction confident and fleet. Whelan, best known for Game of Thrones and Upstart Crow, is commanding as she turns Charlotte into a monster, so driven by her ambition to be in the male-dominated room where it happens that she rides rough-shod over her sisters’ talents to get there.

It’s a tribute to her performance that she never entirely loses our sympathy; the running joke about her hating her appearance as depicted by Branwell’s portrait underlines Charlotte’s sense of being diminished because she is always judged by her appearance.  But the play’s depiction of her stealing Anne’s ideas (to adopt male pseudonyms, to write about the plight of a governess) makes her hard to forgive.

Rhiannon Clements makes Anne a shining beacon of goodness, always the conciliator between her two warring sisters, but gives her just enough spirit to be believable. Adele James brings deep emotion to the under-written part of Emily, author of Wuthering Heights, who rather gets squeezed out of the play’s central thesis.

There are some excellent jokes – a very slow carriage ride to London, depicted by two wheels and coconut shells, a flouncing Mrs Gaskell (Nick Blakeley), determined to make Charlotte such a saint that it will secure her place in the pantheon – and everything whips along so stylishly that it could probably be played without an interval.

But what goes missing amidst the humour and the sisterly squabbling, is the sense that the Brontës did actually deserve their place in the literary canon. The debunking of the mythology that has grown up around them, sweeps their achievements out with the bathwater. It doesn’t really matter who was the most talented sister or who did what to whom. The idea that for one woman to be celebrated, one hundred must be ignored goes under-explored. The fact remains that against the odds all three sisters produced some of the most durable writing of the 19th century. (Sarah Crompton)

3 stars of of 5 from Time Out, too:

‘What’s your favourite Brontë novel?’ demands Gemma Whelan’s bolshy Charlotte Brontë, as she accosts a succession of random audience members at the start of Sarah Gordon’s new play about the literary sisters.

Although really, ‘Underdog’ is mostly a play about the troubled relationship between Charlotte and Anne: the eldest and youngest, most and least famous Brontës. Charlotte is of course forever remembered thanks to her great work ‘Jane Eyre’, while Anne remains the most obscure of the trio - in large part because Charlotte banned further publication of Anne’s hit ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ after her little sister died at 29. 

If it’s not a neat comparison, I’d say there are some parallels with Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus’, with Whelan’s Charlotte the domineering Salieri-style figure, weaving plots against Rhiannon Clements’s gifted but unworldly Anne. 

There’s a lot more swearing here, mind: Gordon’s dialogue is blunt, funny and wilfully anachronistic, the sisters goading each other in modern language, in Yorkshire accents so broad you could land a plane on them. Grace Smart’s set begins as a sumptuous, heather-strewn patch of moorland, but this is rapidly, ruthlessly pulled away – no romantic frills here.

You are never far from a laugh, and the supremely watchable Whelan devours her part whole: she is wonderful as the wildly insecure but entirely fearless Charlotte, swaggering through the story with the elemental strut of a nineteenth-century Liam Gallagher, but beset by a paranoia that swings between justified (Victorian society is not geared towards successful women) and toxic (she mercilessly vents her insecurities out on Anne). Is the underdog Anne? Probably. But it’s also how Charlotte views herself, and in terms of the society of the day, she’s not wrong.

In the end, though, I wasn’t convinced that the funniness of Gordon’s dialogue and Natalie Ibu‘s larky, visually inventive production always best served the actual story they were trying to tell. 

There is a lot here about legacy and memory and the suggestion that the shy, meek Anne we see for most of the play is actually just the version of her that Charlotte posthumously seeded in people’s minds. But this message feels blunted by larkiness, plus the obvious liberties Gordon has herself taken. 

Somebody unacquainted with the Brontës’ novels might get the impression from ‘Underdog’ that ‘Jane Eyre’ was a hack work that Charlotte ripped off from Anne’s overlooked debut ‘Agnes Grey’. Maybe there’s some truth in there. But I mean come on: most of us have read ‘Jane Eyre’ – even if Charlotte was as big a nightmare as ‘Underdog’ suggests, it’s a work of immortal genius. Gordon’s grumpiness about it often feels like she’s pushing a fringey revisionist theory that threatens to overshadow her advocacy for Anne. (It’s also confusing that Charlotte comes across so poorly when it’s intimated that we’re seeing all this from her perspective).

There’s also just something a bit loose end-ish about the lack of anything much for Adele James’s Emily to do – she buzzes around the periphery but Gordon has so little to say about her it almost feels like a distraction to include her. The woman wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’, show her some damn respect!

‘Underdog’ is a very funny play. That funniness doesn’t always work to its advantage. It has nuanced points about authorship, legacy and family that are obscured by the sound of laughter. But you’ll have fun, and you’ll probably want to read ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ afterwards, so in that respect it’s a win. (Andrzej Lukowski)

Also 3 stars out of 5 from City a.m.

Despite the title, this is Charlotte’s story, really. In a stunning opening, Charlotte, played by the excellent Gemma Whelan of Game of Thrones fame, bursts into the theatre, lights still aglare, and demands to know the audience’s favourite Brontë novel. “Jane Eyre", people inevitably cry, to her devilish delight. She tells the audience how a woman’s success often comes at another woman’s expense: at the end of the first act, Charlotte wickedly declares “I’m winning!”

There are flashes of brilliance in Gordon’s play. At one point Charlotte literally clambers into a display case box in an art gallery before the ghost of her sister tempts her back out. The dialogue is generally excellent – plausible and often funny, if a little reliant on contemporary expletives. The Brontës speak to each other in that brutal and intimate manner unique to siblings: they tell each other to “fuck off”, finish each other’s jokes and hold grudges. 

But the themes soon start piling up: talent (what is it?); the elite and poncy world of literary criticism; female competition; beauty standards (Anne is hot, the resentful Charlotte so ugly as to be “unloveable”); legacy; the origin of literary ideas. I tried to clutch at these themes as they swirled incessantly like the hundreds of book rejection letters that fall from the ceiling in the first act, but it was largely futile and frustrating.

Underdog feels like a play for women and more specifically women with siblings. “Do you have a sister?” the woman to my left asked me. “I do,” I said. And in fact, we had just had a blazing row (in a restaurant, embarrassingly). My new friend told me that after the death of her parents, her sister had really stepped up. I told her, with more candidness than I expected, that when my sister and I fight, my whole world implodes but when we’re close, there’s no emotional connection like it. 

Part of me resents the impression this play gives: that women fight and squabble and wish failure upon each other and are envious and mean and cruel. But the play puts this reality firmly in its historical and persisting context. A clever conceit is a panel of bumptious, bespectacled literary critics who circle the stage on a revolving panel with their harsh words amplified and bellowing. They are impressed by the “Bells” – the male pseudonyms taken by the sisters – before they become the Brontës, patently demonstrating their blind prejudice and jibing at the grossly inflated, often malevolent influence of critics. 

The idea of legacy dominates the second act. Emily kicks the bucket aged just 29 and Anne swiftly follows. At this point, despite the tone of the play thus far being largely comedic, Charlotte takes on the role of a romantic poet and waxes lyrical for 10 minutes about rearranging the stars in the sky, then the play canters to an abrupt end.

Underdog is not especially deep, nor particularly innovative, and it’s certainly not historically faithful – but it doesn’t claim to be. Short and ambitious, it hurls ideas into the Yorkshire air, many of which land flat. But examinations of sisterhood are depressingly rare, so when those ideas are explored, they hit hard. (Lucy Kenningham)

5 stars from iNews:

More than 200 years after their births, our fascination with the Brontë sisters burns undimmed. In this ebullient new play, Sarah Gordon examines the iconic trio afresh, revisiting facts both familiar and less so, but overarching her work with a robustly 21st century critique of sisterhood, ambition, reputation and gatekeeping. It makes for an evening of theatre as joyously invigorating as a brisk walk over the Yorkshire Moors.

Right from the start, it is evident which Brontë is going to assume the primary role in this retelling. Gemma Whelan’s Charlotte stands confidently centre stage in a striking red dress and smiles mischievously before saying, “Reader, I think you know who’s most quotable”. Charlotte is fiercely ambitious, railing against the male literary establishment – she does a rollicking impression of Lord Byron – but longing to be accepted by it. It is understood that she and Emily (Adele James) are “the writers” in the family, whereas the job of Anne (Rhiannon Clements), whose favourite word is “sorry”, is to encourage them.

Yet as Gordon’s craftily playful drama unfolds, we are forced to re-evaluate all former certainties. Could it be that that fine writer Charlotte is in fact an unreliable narrator when it comes to her own life and that of her sisters? Given that she lived the longest, did she shape the enduring Brontë narrative in her favour? And how much of Anne’s ideas for Agnes Grey did she really pilfer for Jane Eyre?

Whelan is in her element as the uncompromising Charlotte, witty, selfish and magnificent with it, and is superbly supported by James, whose Emily is a straight-talking bit player. Clements craftily plays a long game of slow-burning confidence as Anne: “I am only small as your little sister, but I am loud on the page,” she says. When the trio alight upon the idea of using pseudonyms for their work, they don masculine dinner jackets over their dresses.

Natalie Ibu’s smart production has the supporting roles played by a group of male actors, who sport top hats with smoking pipes attached to suggest the male critics who harrumphed so loudly over the Brontës’ books when there was the faintest suggestion that they had been written by – gasp – women. Clever use is made of a deliberately silly mini-revolve on the stage, to emphasise how agonisingly slow the horse-drawn carriage ride from Yorkshire to London was – and thus how very far, both metaphorically and literally, the Brontës were from the cultural centre of gravity.

Gordon and Ibu, in tandem with their fine cast, serve to remind us once again about the enduring efficacy of words, of the power that can be unleashed by the simple but sometimes revolutionary act of putting pen to paper. (Fiona Mountford)

4 stars from LondonTheatre1:

Picture this. You’re in the Dorfman Theatre sitting minding your own business, looking at a moorland thicket on the stage and waiting for the show to start when suddenly a woman in a scarlet dress comes charging in and loudly asks random members of the audience what their favourite Brontë novel is. Terrifying if you are the person but asked, but highly amusing for the rest of us. Welcome to Sarah Gordon’s play Underdog: The Other Other Brontë.

The person asking the questions is Charlotte (Gemma Whelan) eldest of the three Brontë sisters and as the moorland flies skyward to hang over the action, we meet the other sister Emily (Adele James) and the other, other sister Anne (Rhiannon Clements). The three live with their brother Branwell (James Phoon) and father in a cloistered Yorkshire parsonage and are broke and fed up. They are broke because Bramwell has a drinking problem, and they are fed up because as nice Victorian women their life options are very limited. Pretty much teaching or getting married is all that they can choose. For while there may be a queen on the throne, this is the age of the patriarchy in all walks of life. The three have pretensions of being writers and as this is not something a woman can (or should) do young Anne comes up with the idea of them using pseudonyms to become three male authors – the brothers Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Or was it Anne’s idea? Was it really Charlotte’s? or did she claim it as her own because of her jealousy towards her younger sister? Questions searching for an answer.

Sometimes I feel like a literary barbarian having not read many of the classics of literature in my time at school. I had heard of the Brontë family and heard, in passing as it were, of ‘Wuthering Heights’ (thanks to Kate Bush), ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ but never really joined the dots. I knew therefore that Underdog: The Other Other Brontë was going to be a bit of an eye-opener for me in regard to the family history. I was also intrigued by an article in the Guardian recently with Natalie Ibu where she talks about comparing the Brontë sisters to the Kardashians, “I’m constantly comparing them, because they’re the ultimate disruptors – and they’re also three sisters with a brother that no one really remembers. We may not like what they stand for, but they are successful and exquisite at what they do,”

The story entirely centres around Charlotte – as she would seem to want it to – and her treatment, either from jealousy or in a spirit of protection, of the youngest sister Anne. It is well known that she suppressed a second print run of ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ but no-one knows why. Unfortunately, Sarah Gordon’s script doesn’t give a definitive answer as to why Charlotte acted the way she did, maybe Charlotte herself never really knew. For me though, I felt that there was an underlying fear governing everything Charlotte did. And that fear was – again my opinion – given shape in the moorland set hanging over the stage, like a metaphorical sword of Damocles, warning Charlotte that at any time the real world could drop back in, and she could be exposed as a mere woman from Yorkshire losing all the fame, respect and influence she had been given by the men in control.

Gemma Whelan. Adele James and Rhiannon Clements give great performances as Charlotte, Emily, and Anne respectively. Unfortunately, Emily feels slightly underwritten – as does Bramwell – and the emphasis is really on Charlotte and Anne and their relationship. Thanks to the quality of the acting and the chemistry between the actors, this works extremely well on the stage.

The show is fast-paced and at times very. Very funny. The three sisters are supported by a team of four men (Nick Blakeley, Adam Donaldson, Kwaku Mills and Julian Moore-Cook) playing a variety of roles and genders as the story progresses, leading to some wonderful highlights including the impressive stagecoach at the start of act II and Blakeley’s interpretation of a flouncing Mrs Gaskell.

Ultimately Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is different and in a good way. There’s a mixture of Victorian and contemporary language that works well. The first time I’ve heard a Victorian author refer to anyone as a bell-end. The revolving stage makes scene changes easy and sharp and overall, the play, which is very funny in places, raises a lot of questions about feminism, sibling rivalry, fame, and ambition (back to the Kardashians possibly). I’m not sure the story answers all of the points it raises but, to my mind, that is not its job. The play is entertaining, informative and, going by some of the conversations I heard as I was leaving, definitely starts a discussion that can go on long into the night. (Terry Eastham)

4 stars too from West End Best Friend:

The year is 1845 and misogyny is the norm. Women should know their place and that place is certainly not as a published author. However, the Brontë Sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne are here to change that using their pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell to fool the men and have their work judged fairly. This is a well-known story in the literary world and beyond but playwright Sarah Gordon has reimagined it for the modern audience. Directed by Natalie Ibu the pair have well and truly transported the Brontës into the 21st Century which makes for an sensational and shocking evening of theatre.  

Love, legacy and literature are at the centre of Underdog: The Other Other Brontë; as are the Brontë sisters played by Gemma Whelan, Adele James and Rhiannon Clements in age order. They are a formidable trio capturing the tumultuous nature of sisterhood. The other other Brontë in the title refers to Anne (Clements) but Charlotte (Whelan) is our storyteller standing front and centre to break the fourth wall and confess her sins. Whelan is brash but charismatic. At times her performance is verging on a caricature as her Yorkshire accent grows a bit too broad, but this indulgence is befitting for her larger than life portrayal of Charlotte which is compelling and also emotional at times. In comparison Clements is natural and nuanced as the youngest sister Anne striving against the odds to make her way in a world not designed for or desiring of women’s success. Adele James unfortunately gets less stage time than her sisters as Emily is sidelined by Charlotte’s obsession with Anne. However in this play about jealously, competition and women supporting women she is an essential pillar in promoting these themes. 

One of the shining qualities of Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is its confidence in its message and how it wants to share it. This is a play about the power of words and Ibu has chosen hers carefully. Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is witty, intelligent and playful but loses none of its power through the hilarity. This is a show that is not afraid to be silly. Atmospheric sound design by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite is paired with a few modern day girl power anthems. The set and costumes designed by Grace Smart are simple yet incredibly effective. The male chorus are able to transform in a moment the highlight being Nick Blakeley as the spiteful Mrs Ingram and Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë’s first biographer. The stage includes a sleek revolve but also uses techniques which would be at home in an amateur production. These elements are equally endearing and funny, in particular the opening of act two when coconut shells are used to accompany a particularly long carriage ride to London. 

One can imagine, but will not presume, that gender might divide the reception to this play. However, this would cement the importance and relevance of the piece and its success in capturing the experiences of women through history. That being said, the elements of competition and comparison are not reserved only for the fairer sex and through James Phoon’s portrayal of Branwell Brontë we can view Underdog: The Other Other Brontë as a wider commentary on how society receives art. This play is not intended to be a history lesson but in the final moments as Charlotte steps into a glass display case the narrative of judgement becomes too overt and our opinion of the Brontë sisters and their place in literacy history is decided for us. 

Raucous, irreverent and relevant... Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is another innovative success for the National Theatre. (Sophie Luck)

London Theatre gives it 4 stars, too:

The ever-enduring yet constantly contended myths surrounding the Brontë sisters are impishly upended in Sarah Gordon’s raucously funny new play for the National Theatre and Northern Stage, which mixes gothic tropes with family drama and astute literary criticism.

Underdog centres on the sibling rivalry between the three aspiring writers: Charlotte, Emily and the titular historically sidelined sister, Anne. Although they are united as women scorned by the establishment, and forced to assume male pseudonyms in order to get their work published, there’s also fierce competition between them.

Gordon brings their story bang up to date with her (still depressingly apt) feminist commentary on how women are forced to battle one another when given such limited space. Anne accuses Charlotte of upstaging her novel (Agnes Grey) with a work also focussed on a powerless governess (Jane Eyre); a squirrelly Charlotte protests that it’s only important this female story is told, not by whom.

There is even, à la Barbie, a moment where the trio pity their brother Branwell for being a fellow victim of the patriarchy – although this seems like an overly generous defence of a feckless, spendthrift drunkard.

It’s the prickly dynamics between the three sisters that really compel: the ambitious but overbearing Charlotte, who claims writing as “her” thing; the hot-tempered yet prolific Emily; and the initially meek Anne who, as portrayed here, actually has the boldest ideas and a passionate social conscience.

Gordon takes the view that Charlotte felt threatened by Anne (who died aged just 29) and so constantly suppressed her. That includes refusing a posthumous reprint of her sister’s extraordinary novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which features a woman leaving her abusive addict husband – a revolutionary act in the mid 19th century.

Gordon’s script is also peppered with cheeky anachronisms and colourful swearing (Robert Southey is a “bellend”; “The education system in this country,” snarls Charlotte, “is fucked.”) As Charlotte, Gemma Whelan opens the show by swaggering through the audience like a rock star, demanding to know our fave Brontë quotes and offering selfies.

Director Natalie Ibu adds further gags, like a wonderfully silly riff on the interminable horse and carriage ride (complete with Monty Python-esque coconuts). There are nods to the gothic novels too: Grace Smart gives us a misty moor which is raised above the stage, roots left dangling, and when Charlotte is in a temper, thunder and lightning are never far behind.

We glimpse the real-world inspirations for the Brontës’ writing, and, conversely, how their lives were neatly shaped into socially acceptable narratives – partly by Charlotte, and then by their first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell. Somewhere in between lies the truth. But what’s ultimately more important: hewing to realism (as Anne mainly does in her work), or crafting the juicier story?

The latter is more enjoyable in theatre, so Charlotte gets the best of it here, and Whelan is a charismatic powerhouse. The play’s meta-commentary ponders whether she’s “likeable” enough (a question seldom asked of a male character), but Whelan teases out the insecurity and loneliness beneath her relentless drive to achieve literary fame and status, as well as revelling in Charlotte’s bullish narcissism and spiky wit.

Rhiannon Clements brings affecting conviction to the gentler Anne (and may well inspire audience members to seek out or revisit her novels), while Adele James is a fiery Emily and the male supporting cast ably, if cartoonishly, multi-role.

Gordon’s telling has its own imbalances: Emily gets slightly lost in the mix. But in wittily breezing past the period trappings, she reclaims the sisters as complicated modern heroines, and asks searching questions about the artistic gatekeepers we still have in place today. That’s when this blistering production hits the wuthering heights. (Marianka Swain)

And finally just 2 stars out of 5 from The Stage, which deems it a 'wasted opportunity'.

In the gift shop at Haworth Parsonage – famously the Yorkshire home of the Brontë family – you can buy badges that read Team Charlotte, Team Emily or Team Anne. Perhaps they sell a Team Branwell version too – although I doubt there’s much demand. That pitting of the brilliant literary sisters against each other is a shrewd marketing ploy, but in this new play from Sarah Gordon, it proves a less than solid foundation for satisfying drama. Cheerfully dismantling the myths of wily, windy moors, madwomen in attics and buttoned-down bosoms heaving with repressed passions, Gordon sets out to show us three siblings bonded by blood and womanhood, but divided by jealousy and sibling rivalry. While the irreverent send-up of gothic cliché is welcome, the results are reductive to the point of becoming glib and cartoonish, and the perspective on creative women – always scrapping over a precious foothold in a male-dominated world, always looking to take one another down – is depressingly ungenerous.

Natalie Ibu’s staging – a co-production with Northern Stage – sets the jocular, surface-skimming tone immediately. The moorland thicket on Grace Smart’s revolving set is whisked aloft, to hang, half-seen, above the action; and Gemma Whelan as Charlotte comes galumphing through the stalls, brash and sweary, demanding of punters which is their favourite Brontë novel. Dressed in scarlet, she’s the star, in her own mind at least; Gordon’s clumsy title suggests Adele James’ Emily, in sky blue, is the ‘other’ Brontë, while Rhiannon Clements as overlooked Anne, in a sickly shade of mauve, is the ‘other other’ one.

The implication that Emily is a reputational also-ran is dubious (who hasn’t heard of Wuthering Heights?); but Gordon’s depiction of Charlotte as envious, even exploitative, of Anne rests largely on the historical fact that Charlotte did indeed suppress the republication of Anne’s shocking novel of domestic abuse, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, after Anne’s death. Perhaps she wanted to protect the purity of her youngest sister’s memory; perhaps she really was jealous. Nothing in Gordon’s play is especially illuminating either way. It pays lip service, in contrived conversations, to gender-based restrictions on female freedom and art (all three sisters published under cleverly encoded male pseudonyms), and to the idea of revisionist cultural legacy – a final scene sees Charlotte literally imprisoned in a glass museum display case. But mostly, in dialogue in which modern vernacular rubs up against period pastiche and direct literary quotation, the trio squabbles, twitters and occasionally lusts over a “hot” man; while a five-strong, all-male supporting ensemble larks about as a selection of comically caricatured critics, authors, dowagers and – most memorably – as Elizabeth Gaskell, the priggish Victorian novelist and Charlotte’s biographer (a vivid Nick Blakeley).

Heartbreak, terminal sickness, their brother’s alcoholism – these biographical details are skated over. There’s nothing deeply felt and scant sense of character, in a play more invested in winning easy laughs from conveying a bone-rattling carriage ride to London with clip-clopping coconut shells. The actors are game and hard-working, and at best it’s mildly entertaining. But as an exploration of women who left us such sinewy, sexy, courageous writing, it feels like a sadly wasted opportunity. (Sam Marlowe)

In other important Brontë news, Christa Ackroyd writes for The Yorkshire Post about the dream come true that is the fact that the Brontë Birthplace is now in public ownership.

Built from Yorkshire gritstone, rows upon rows of similar conjoined dwellings sprung up to house the burgeoning population drawn to find work in the newly built woollen mills whose dominance of the landscape with their billowing sooty chimneys changed what was once little more than a small rural enclave into a sprawling, dirty even dangerous, industrial city.

I humbly suggest we have acquired the best. For behind its doors were born Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë as well as their infamous brother Patrick Branwell.

All the social history of the Georgian into Victorian era is there from the hitherto unseen servants’ staircase, the scullery and the nursery, to the gentile parlour where Mr Brontë would greet his parishioners and where he and his wife would socialise with newfound friends and acquaintances while the nursemaid 13 year old Nancy Garrs would be tasked with putting the children to bed.

And let us not forget the gem that is the original fireplace besides which greatness was born not once but three times, four if you include Patrick Branwell although he somewhat wasted his talents to die three decades later in a laudanum laced fit of melancholy having being rejected by his married lover Mrs Robinson. Oh the stories that little house could and will tell. [...]

And so at last we have their little house. Work begins next week in preserving its past to be enjoyed for the first time by all as the final important piece of the jigsaw that is the Brontë story. It will largely be closed for twelve months as we decide how to show and tell of its secrets in readiness for Bradford City of Culture 2025.

There are endless possibilities open to us as guardians of this important piece of Yorkshire history. None more so than how to pay homage to the legacy of three girls who were told they couldn’t achieve their place in society or in literature yet disregarding convention went on to become the greatest sibling authors of all time.

It is a huge and important undertaking not least because we have achieved investment from more than 700 shareholders and almost £500,000 from the public purse in terms of City of Culture and government levelling up funds. Already this week has been filled with meetings with builders, decorators , architects, creators, educators and all those we will need to bring our vision to reality and inspire the next generation to achieve too.

But the first and most important decision has had nothing to do with decor and what will be our Georgian colour palette. It does not need the creation of mood boards or even require any knowledge about the great works of the sisters who each in their own way challenged convention as no other female writers had ever done before.

It is about how and where in a somewhat cramped complex warren of grade 2* starred listed building with little no outdoor space we can include a disabled ramp, a wheelchair lift and a disabled toilet. There is some debate about whether we need to legally because of its deemed historic infrastructure.

There is absolutely no debate morally that we must. If there is one theme which remains a constant in all of the sisters’ great works it is the prejudice show to those who are different. Inclusivity and the realisation that whoever we are and whatever challenges we face we are all equal, all deserving of a chance in life, will be one of the major themes of all our little house will offer. And I mean all.

This week I have read in the newspapers of schools where parents have been given the choice as to whether they wish the annual photograph to be offered with children of disability airbrushed out.

I have read of actress Sally Phillips continued campaign on behalf of her son who has Down’s syndrome and others like him to be allowed to enjoy life with all the same experiences open to others after he was turns away from a trampolining play area, a place he had been to many times before but where they were ‘tightening up’ their policies.

One minute we as a country are deemed too woke the next creating divisive policies which are positively Dickensian. Well not behind our front door in Thornton I can promise you

I can’t tell what the Brontë birthplace will look like .. it will evolve over the next few weeks. I can’t tell you exactly what it will offer for those who come to walk in the footsteps of Yorkshire greatness, that is now the exciting part.

But I promise you this, the Brontë birthplace will be a house where difference is celebrated, where everyone will be equally welcome and where the legacy of three girls who fought for acceptance for all will continue to influence generations to come.

We owe them nothing less.