Bronte @ Chesil Theatre, Winchester
Extreme sibling rivalry. Lack of privacy. An austere father. Death, death and more death. Sisters supporting a struggling brother. Welcome to the every day life of the Bronte family as envisaged by Polly Teale.
Despite very strong writing and powerful performances, clearly the playwright hasn’t read The Mother of the Brontes: When Maria Met Patrick by Sarah Wright, which shows a tenderer, romantic, literary side to Patrick and a cultured, literary, sociable mother too. Not to mention her sister. Instead it falls into cliche to begin with — down with corsets and skirts, down with restrictive parents — especially their deceased and unknown mother, down with social conventions and respectability. Yet Aunt Bramwell, their mother’s aunt, lived with them for many years and was a surrogate mother in many ways — she would, purely by loving the items their mother loved and their mother, have brought her alive for them.
Nor were they aloof and isolated — as the play and Elizabeth Gaskell, like to portray them. Even wandering over the wuthering moors, they’d encounter numerous industries taking place. Rather than wuthering, it was clamorous and clanging! Albeit that their father’s parishioners were mostly mill workers, easily wounded and taken down by life in the new cotton mills.
What did set them apart was their prodigious love of literature, sparked by Irish, Cornish and Yorkshire folk tales. Not to mention that their father was a literal speaker, teacher and preacher of words — the Word. Some of those sermons must have rubbed off on them. As did their remaining parent’s love of reading and books, and all the family’s writing skills.
But we don’t really see this here — it’s all about repression. Nor do we see the keen writing skills Charlotte (Jen Hale) and Bramwell (Andrew Jenks) honed, imagining their Waterloo influenced lands. It’s hinted at with the Commander, but we don’t really see the soldiers they were all turning into novelised characters, apart from one at the end. Instead Bramwell and Charlotte fight viciously, often insulting each other — until a drunken Bramwell brutalises his sister, and then asks for a story. We don’t see Gondal coming into full being, nor their shared creative genius.
What is better done is Bramwell’s many coming and goings — he sets out to join the Academy as an artist — only to return failed, with all his money gone. He and Anne go off to work as tutor and governess in a wealthy family, only for them to return suddenly in disgrace. Bramwell has had an affair with his employer’s wife! Purposeless, he degenerates into good times and bullying chaos within his family, as his father lies upstairs — ill and with decreasing eyesight. All the while knowing that his sisters are achieving more than him, perhaps more talented and cleverer and acclaimed.
Brushed over later on, but worth saying, is how incredibly brave Patrick was — he had a cataract operation without anesthetic which restored his sight. And put him in bed in the dark for five days.
What the production does well is show Charlotte’s controlling, invasive and pushy relationship with Emily (Juliette Cross) — who just wants some space to do her own thing — and Anne’s (Lauren Grierson) passionate critiques of society, particularly in the ways boys and girls are treated in education, and the expectations society places on men and women. Though Anne loses her seaside romance. I loved Anne’s compassion for others, and the Bronte sisters excitement at visiting their publisher and seeing all of London.
The sisters scribble in secret and in pairs, whilst Bramwell is meant to achieve success in the world. Only he can’t, and he brings his pain, loathing and failure home with him, with terrifying results. I did enjoy Patrick Bronte (Ade Fry) telling everyone to be quiet after Bramwell has been on the rampage, and the only good man really is the gentle and kind Curate, who loves Charlotte from afar. And whom she sees as a nuisance.
Experiencing terrible isolation after the death of all her siblings, dreaming of their suffering, Charlotte accepts Arthur Bell Nichol’s (Andrew Jenks) proposal in a curious, churlish fashion. Yet she learns to love and to be loved. We never see Patrick’s isolation and pain as he loses his wife and all his children, and goes on. Overall, I’m not sure either Patrick or Bramwell get fair treatment — Bramwell is all boastfulness and Gothic monstrousness in his misery and addictions, Patrick stern and reproving.
The faith never convinces here either. The Brontes experience disbelief, grief, mourning, existential angst — yet throughout all their works, spirituality and a belief in God were inherent. Here it’s seen as a social construct — even when Patrick or the Curate pray, it’s not very heartfelt, merely polite. Therefore we never really enter the world of the Brontes with its fierce belief in life and death — nor do we enter the wide non-conformist circle they and Elizabeth Gaskell were a part of.
More convincing is Zoe Stanford as sundry literary women including Cathy and Bertha, who dances, grieves and speaks life into the family stories. She also represents Bramwell’s lost love and indeed the creative spirit. Like the deceased siblings, she haunts their memories and dreams.