WUTHERING SIBLINGS
Grace Smart the designer sets the scene as we settle in with a sweet miniature moor, all harebells and heather and cloddy bits of earth. But it rises in the air as soon as Gemma Whelan’s cheerful, swaggering Charlotte Bronte has toured the auditorium demanding to know what our favourite novel is. The overhead grassland stays up there throughout, just occasionally throwing down sheets of paper or a microphone.
Charlotte opens the family scene with her two sisters – Rhiannon Clements as gentle Anne and Adele James as the tougher middle-sister Emily, whose first enterprise is throwing a bucket of water over the drunken brother Bramwell. Charlotte already longs to express herself publicly, to be “forever known” and the poet laureate Southey has written a letter back to her. It repressively tells her that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life” because women have other jobs to get on with, and should do so. And off we go, in a revue-style but heartfeltly indignant feminist take on the struggle of all three to break into the 1840s literary world from an impecunious Yorkshire parsonage.
Reimagining the Brontes of Haworth is a perennial temptation: in an am-dram imagination by the gipsy artist Vernon Parker Rose I once played an imaginary extra sister called Shirley who did all the work while real Heathcliffs, Rochesters and Lintons lounged around the house drinking with Bramwell (one cast member kept forgetting his lines, and I can tell you there is quite a skill in prompting someone out of the side of your mouth away from the audience). And then there is the more famous appropriation, when in Comfort Farm the intellectual Mybug is convinced that brother Branwell wrote all the books.
This version, by Sarah Gordon, directed by Natalie Ibu of Northern Stage, has a more serious purpose. But it executes it with plenty of jokes, a lot of thoroughly modern “dickhead-and-fuckwit” language, and on a neat outer revolve a lot of quickfire visual jokes and sound effects (when Anne goes off to be a governess, the obliging ensemble of five nip out with a portable gale, and the second act obliges with a genuine coconut-clopping carriage).
Sarah Gordon has usefully picked up on something I had not quite grasped before; that the three sisters’ novels were all , in 1947, published within three months: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (a rapid hit), then Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. The relationships between the sisters – collaborative, pseudonymous as three “Bell” brothers, and sometimes envious – are the core of the story. Certainly it is not improbable that Anne would be irritated by Charlotte borrowing the governess-figure and getting her version published before the gentler satire and romance of Agnes Grey; nor that Charlotte’s disappointment about the initially rejected one about her Belgian professor was keen. And we know that Anne’s far more powerful , shocking and angry Tenant of Wildfell Hall was – after her death – blocked from reprinting by Charlotte. The drunken violent husband was too close to Branwell, by then also dead. The truth of it was too painful, or discreditable.
All this rolls out between them, and between various more or less hilarious male figures – snotty publishers, a chorus of admiring or shocked critics, condemnatory moralists. As Charlotte observes, they had to write because the normal life of a Victorian woman left an awful lot of spare time for “putting dead people’s hair in lockets” and as to private life”you wonder why we didn’t smile in photographs – we were horny and terrified”. The moment when at last, outing themselves as females, she and Anne go to London and are invited to a private male club is evoked as a sort of blokey Groucho rave. It drives Anne to hide and afflicts Charlotte with unwonted loss of personal confidence. Being “in the room” with the Dickenses and Thackerays was both thrilling and dismaying.
And from the fine and funny Ensemble Nick Blakeley appears at the end as Elizabeth Gaskell, politely-mannered biographer of Charlotte, to put her in a glass display case. So we can reflect on how and why the reinventions of the Brontes have always been necessary, and salutary. Some of the stuff about literary “gatekeepers” may strike a useful note with female playwrights too: the NT hasn’t done entirely badly in recent years, but 74% of successful dramatists in the UK are still chaps…
Nationaltheatre.org.uk. To 25 may
Rating three.
theatreCat 