Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Jordi Mand, directed by Vanessa Porteous
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
June 21-October 13, 2018
“Life is hard for all of us”
Anyone who loves the works of the Brontë sisters should steer clear of the play Brontë: The World Without now playing at the Stratford Festival. Not only does Jordi Mand’s play provide no insight whatsoever into the lives of the Brontës, but it is among the most boring plays ever presented at the Festival. One might suppose that in the space of two hours an author could think of something interesting for three of the most acclaimed female authors of the 19th century to say to each other. But no, Mand perversely frustrates that expectation.
The fact that most people find intriguing about the three Brontë sisters is that they led such sheltered, uneventful lives and yet produced such wild, vividly imagined works – Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne. Except for their work as governesses, for Charlotte and Emily’s trip to Brussels for study and teaching and for Charlotte and Anne’s trip to London to reveal their identities to their publisher who had only known their male pseudonyms, the three sisters virtually never left the small village of Haworth in Yorkshire. They cared for their father who was the parish curate and for their dissolute brother Branwell, who was addicted to alcohol and opium and carried on an affair with a married woman.
Likely in order to make Brontë: The World Within specifically a women’s play, Mand focusses solely on Charlotte (Beryl Bain), Emily (Jessica B. Hill) and Anne (Andrea Rankin) and banishes the father and Branwell from the stage. We do hear of the men from noises and voices off stage, but they never appear. This is a major mistake because if there was any source of drama in the Brontë sisters’ lives it was their conflict with their strict father and their attempts to cope with a brother bent on self-destruction. British author Polly Teale’s play Brontë (2005) includes not only the sisters’ father and brother but also some of the characters the sisters created. Perhaps because Teale had already taken this imaginative path, Mand did not follow it, but in so doing she removed all the sources for drama that could animate a play.
Thus, Mand does not show us how Branwell and his sisters began creating fictional countries and filling them with ever more complicated stories as a clue to how their imaginations stimulated by storytelling in playing later formed a basis for storytelling in writing. Instead, she begins when the sisters’ father is recovering from a fall from his pulpit while Branwell is away in parts unknown. Mand devotes much of the first part of the play to cataloguing in minute detail just how poor the Brontës are, even going item by item through the contents of their larder and what they can and cannot afford to buy.
Eventually, Charlotte, realizing that they have all secretly been writing poetry, decides that maybe they can make some money by publishing a collection of their poems. This in turn leads to the discovery that they have all secretly been writing novels and to their publication, after many rejections of these works, all the while keeping their success hidden from their unseen brother and father.
Without attempting to delve into the sources of the sisters’ creativity, Mand’s portraits of the three women are two-dimensional. Charlotte is the sensible one, Emily is the emotional one and Anne, as the youngest, the the most childishly self-centred. This gives the actors very little to work with but Beryl Bain as Charlotte and Jessica B. Hill make a good contrasting pair. Bain gives us the feeling that Charlotte is forcing herself to be sensible because of the illogic that besets her younger two sisters. Jessica B. Hill almost succeeds in winning sympathy for Emily’s pathological shyness but we wish Mand would give us more background to help us understand her.
As Anne, Andrea Rankin is annoying both as an actor and a character. It may be that Rankin is trying to show that Anne is the youngest, but her voice is grating and uninflected, especially compared to the rounded tones of Bain and Hill. Rankin is able only to emphasize Anne’s wilfulness and her general recalcitrance to anything that her older sisters suggest. This makes it even harder to understand how she has the concentration needed to write any novel, much less a great one.
If this were not bad enough, director Vanessa Porteous makes the tedious experience even worse. The interludes between the play’s scenes show the three writing furiously at their portable desks with their quills quivering while loud rock music, with an unidentified singer and totally at odds with the setting, deafens our ears. How could Porteous not see how ridiculous it is repeatedly to show us the outward signs of writers writing especially in a play that never reveals the inner impulse behind this writing nor even gives us excerpts of what they are writing? It’s as if we had a play about a composer where all we saw was the composer scratching away at a score but never heard the music being composed.
Many fans will flock to Brontë: The World Without simply because of their love of the sisters’ novels. They will leave in extreme disappointment not only having learned nothing and but also having found their beloved characters portrayed as tedious and even off-putting. This is another pointless Stratford commission given that a successful and far more imaginative play about the Brontës, namely Polly Teale’s Brontë, already exists ready to be performed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Andrea Rankin as Anne, Beryl Bain as Charlotte and Jessica B. Hill as Emily; Beryl Bain as Charlotte. ©2018 Hilary Gauld Camilleri.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2018-09-02
Brontë: The World Without