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30 March 2010
Bronte at Oxford
"Oxford Playhouse by the Shared Experiencecompany"
By: Julia Gasper. "A theatre review" "Bronte", Polly Teale's play about the Bronte family, is being performed at the Oxford Playhouse by the Shared Experiencecompany which is now the theatre's resident theatrical company. http://www.sharedexperience.org.uk/ The Brontes are as fascinating as ever and the roles of the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne - and their brother Branwell, are wonderfully dramatic. The play, set in a gaunt, stark drab-coloured evocation of the lonely parsonage on the Yorkshire moors where the family lived and dreamed, circles in time, showing us the return of the disgraced Branwell from his job as a tutor, which had ended because of a forbidden love affair, then presenting scenes from the Brontes' childhood, when two elder sisters died. Among the family members move the figures of Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff and the mad Mrs Rochester. For any aspiring writer today, it is cheering to learn that even the Brontes had to endure many rejections from publishers, some of them downright insulting. Charlotte is inevitably the centre of the drama, as she emerges as leader when it becomes clear that Branwell would be destroyed by his own weaknesses. She was the only one of the family who realized that for success, she had to compromise with the prim and repressive attitudes of the time and fight both sides of the war of passion. She ended up betraying Emily by removing impious or rebellious sentiments from her poems, and quite possibly even burning a second novel. This play is slightly too long, and whatever the arguments for the meta-drama opening, I think it would be better scrapped, along with the bits of narrative biography which intrude and really add nothing. This is meant to be a play, not a volume of Coles Notes, and it is surely unnecessary for the programme to offer summaries of the plots of the sisters' novels. If you have read them, you will not forget them, and if you haven't read them, heaven help you. http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ Thursday 24 March - Saturday 2 April | ||
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