Writing the Brontë sisters into a frustrating corner
Brontë: The World Without (out of four) By Jordi Mand, directed by Vanessa Porteous. Until October 13 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George St. E., Stratford. Stratfordfestival.ca and 1-800-567-1600.
Discovering more about great artists through artworks about them can be rewarding — think Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould — but is also fraught with potential problems. How to represent creativity and inspiration, which are internal and complex? How to move beyond the historical record into imaginative speculation? Undertaking such work on stage rather than on film or TV adds another layer of complication, because you can’t rely on close-ups and screen effects to suggest emotional and intellectual activity.
Young playwright Jordi Mand attempts this weighty task in this world-premiere play, which depicts five crucial days over three years in the lives of the sister writers Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. But the play and Vanessa Porteous’s production don’t come close to finding answers to the challenges of the task, leaving the threeperson cast straining to deliver ponderous material.
Mand explains in a program note that the Brontë sisters understood their experience as split into two worlds. One was the Yorkshire parsonage where they lived with their father until all three of them died before the age of 40 (close to the average life expectancy at the time), and the other was the “world without” that they dreamed to access — depicted in the production as the possibility of agency, self-realization and legacy.
This play is ostensibly about that outside world (hence the subtitle) but set inside the parsonage. This is one in a series of choices that constrains Mand’s creative options and set the evening on its creaky path.
Another odd choice is the strong limits she places on discussion and representation of the sisters’ literary work.
There are several episodes of them physically writing (not the most compelling of stage actions) and we witness them deciding to publish their work and — in the production’s most well-realized moments, captured in Kimberly Purtell’s lighting — placing their books on a shelf with love and pride. But what are they writing about, why are they writing it and how does this connect to their limited life possibilities?
Perhaps the thinking of Mand, Porteus and dramaturge Bob White was that the substance of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is too well-known to merit bringing it into the frame.
But what ends up filling that space is overextended passages about tea being too hot or cold, about who’s going to open the envelope that’s arrived in the post and — most depressingly — about who loved whom better and who’s jealous of whom. Sure, these women were human, too, and vulnerable and perhaps needy — but because we don’t have access to their creative voices, what we’re left with is the stuff of ordinary life, which is not very dramatic.
Narda McCarroll’s scenic design frames the sisters’ life world with their words — manuscript pages are inlaid in the stone floors and framed on the walls in place of paintings — but this only adds to the frustration. Why use the writing as a physical flourish if you’re going to keep it out of the play itself?
The two male figures whose power and embodied presence shaped and limited the sisters’ lives — their father and the alcoholic, erratic brother Branwell — remain offstage, but their presence is made known through clumsy sound effects of doors closing, footfalls and the odd burp (sound design is by Anton de Groot).
There’s a strong whiff of potential violence when the sisters clutch hands and cower as Branwell passes by their door, and a connection implied but not pursued about how this possibly monstrous threat ended up in their writing — in the character of Heathcliff, particularly.
Another place where potential drama is corralled and sapped is in wordless passages of staging between the segments, points where the actors are sometimes called on to express evolving thought and emotion.
It’s frustrating to watch the skilled actor Beryl Bain as Charlotte have a big idea and then scribble on a lot of pages and to know, because the play has set this up, that we’re not going to find out what is so inspiring and moving her. These passages are set to recorded music from different periods up to the contemporary; this postmodern touch clashes with the otherwise naturalistic tendencies of writing and production.
Bain’s performance as driven, determined Charlotte is the production’s strongest aspect. Jessica B. Hill works hard to convey Emily’s physical and psychological weaknesses. And Andrea Rankin, as the youngest and least historically successful sister, Anne, has a distracting tendency to play toward the light and away from her scene partners.
This is Mand’s fourth play and a big opportunity to advance her career at one of the country’s most prestigious and bestfunded theatre institutions, but systems that one would have hoped would support her have left her and her actors exposed.