Theatre review: Bronte

THERE'S PLENTY to admire, and even to enjoy, in this touring co-production by Shared Experience and The Watermill Theatre. Polly Teale's play is a passionate account of the lives of the Bront sisters and their brother Branwell, shaped by Teale's work over the years in adapting Jane Eyre for the stage, and in pursuing its themes in her play After Mrs Rochester.

A series of short, sometimes impressionistic scenes, Bront merges practical reality, fictional invention and erotic dreaming, as the sisters endure the emotional and physical deprivation of their motherless lives at Haworth Parsonage, fail to find conventional ways of expressing the fierce erotic drives women of their time were not supposed to have, and strive to "make life bearable" through their common gift for passionate storytelling.

Even in the enforced absence through injury of the actor playing Branwell – with a last-minute replacement reading the part – the performances of the young cast are strikingly open, heartfelt and true; Kristin Atherton's Charlotte is strong, touching and complex, Elizabeth Crerar's Emily a passionate portrait of a near-autistic soul full of greatness.

What's never clear about this thoughtful and decent show, though, is why it exists at all. Nancy Meckler's production is full of tired 1980s conventions, with constant energy-sapping fades to black between scenes, and odd bits of ineffectual expressionistic movement thrown into the text at strange angles. The play tells us nothing about the Bronts that is not already well known. And, above all, it never addresses the key question about this kind of biographical drama, which is why – when it's the work that makes them great – we seem increasingly unable to digest the stories these great writers had to tell, and are ever more interested in their lives, at the expense of their work.