October/November 2008
Directed by Yves Green
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.