Those of us with a hatred of costume drama are in good company. Although the three actors of Stute theatre turn up for their tribute to the Brontë sisters, I Am No Bird, in regulation bonnets and historically accurate cotton dresses, something is amiss.
After a pretty piano song, they try reading some Brontë prose. But the corsets are too tight and the mood too genteel. The passages come across as melodramatic where they should be impassioned. Instead of the maverick Brontës, they are giving us heritage theatre. It can’t last.
In something of the iconoclastic spirit of Isobel McArthur’s Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), they strip back the trappings of chocolate-box history in an attempt to capture what made the sisters striking in the first place. Breaking the rules was one of them. It isn’t long before they’re dropping the needlework in favour of talking to the audience, taking phone calls and appearing to go off script.
In a cheerful hour-long show, they run briskly through the story of Charlotte, Anne and Emily – plus ambivalent mention of brother Branwell. They alight in particular on the advice of poet laureate Robert Southey that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not to be”. That was just a forewarning of the male-centric publishing industry and misogynistic press to come. Central to this all-female show is the principle of women’s empowerment.
Sophia Hatfield, who co-writes with director Lisa Cagnacci, plays Charlotte as a woman torn between obedience and rebelliousness, trying to keep control of her own play even as she recognises the creative disruptiveness of her sisters. “Is it advisable to bring someone like Heathcliff into the world?” she asks Emily, uncertain whether to be shocked or thrilled.
Claire-Marie Seddon’s Emily, the least conformist, has no time for such reticence. Emma Swan’s Anne is happy to go with the flow. When in doubt, they whip out the trumpet, violin and clarinet, set up a vocal loop and sing sweet harmonies under the musical direction of Farhaan Aamir Shah.
It makes for a bright and breezy show, but for all its anarchic impulses, it remains at heart a biographical drama, dedicated to the facts as much as the feminism.
• At Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, until 30 April. Then touring until 14 May.
