In the spring of 2003 the Players presented Jane Eyre, the first play in a trilogy devised and dramatised by Polly Teale, Associate Director for the extraordinary Shared Experience Theatre Company. Such was the creative experience of working on this type of physical and imaginative drama that I was delighted to be asked to direct Brontë, Teale’s final work on this most famous literary family.

‘How is it possible that three Victorian spinsters, living in isolation on the Yorkshire moors could have written some of the most powerful and passionate fiction of all time?’

Brontë seeks to answer this question by dramatising, not only the lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne but also their fictional characters, Jane Eyre, Bertha (the mad woman in the attic, seen by Teale as Charlotte/Jane’s alter ego), Rochester, Cathy Earnshaw and her maid Nelly, Heathcliff, and Anne’s creation, Arthur Huntington.

In the drab domestic isolation of a rural rectory, we glimpse the Brontë family struggling to cope with a partially sighted, dominant father and a brother who has failed to live up to his imagined glory. With nothing more than a change of lights the family are revealed as youngsters playing and inventing their extraordinary stories.

For Charlotte, Emily and Anne, writing becomes almost an alternative existence. As they share their stories with each other and us,the audience, their fictional characters manifest themselves, revealing the intensity of the sisters’ internal lives.

This is the story about a famous literary family. It is also a story of loss, longing, desire, identity, rivalry, failure and the price of success. In fact just about every human emotion is laid bare in Teale’s quest to dramatise the lives of the Brontë family. She states: “The play seeks to explore the collision between drab, domesticity and unfettered, soaring imagination.” 

We hope you will share with us the thrill of unravelling the turbulent lives of the Brontë family.

Yves Green
September 2008