Bronte @ the Maddermarket
Sorry Brontë, I wanted to love you, I really did
It pains me to say this about something I had high hopes for… but oh dear. Brontë has been described by The Times as a ‘densely-satisfying play’ – a claim I struggle to identify with. The intention of telling the story of a passionate and volatile family was clear; the execution however, not so much. The play seemed to stretch on endlessly, marked mainly by the melodramatic peaks that involved a lot of unintelligible screaming. The actress doubling as Cathy Earnshaw and Bertha Mason certainly had stage presence, but her erotic, impassioned scenes were amongst the strangest I’ve ever seen. Whether deliberately or not, there lacked a certain sense of continuity between my favorite passages of Jane Eyre, and what I was seeing on stage.
Phillip Rowe delivered a good performance, particularly his accent work, and the staging was well thought out. On the whole though, I’d give it a miss. The social commentary attempted on gender, industrialization, God and philosophy seemed strained and obvious. I struggled to find the sisters’ ecstatic squeals of ‘Byron!’ and ‘Thackeray!’ believable, and ultimately wasn’t invested in their story. S
Sorry Brontë, I wanted to love you, I really did.
