Shared Experience are probably the
highest-profile theatre company to lose the entirety of their
subvention from the Arts Council of England in the recently announced
funding round; on press night co-artistic director Nancy Meckler, who
also directed this production, made an appeal at curtain-call for
statements of support to bolster the company’s case. And yet, sad as it
would be to see them disappear, I cannot convince myself that they are
entirely compelling candidates for extraordinary reprieve.
They
have proven so influential in their approach of wedding text-based work
to more impressionistic visual sequences that there is little need for
the originators to persist, and in any case it’s an easy approach to
muff: at times here, the young company (with whom Meckler is working at
the invitation of the Watermill Theatre near Newbury) seem a little
sheepish in their twirling-about moments. It also feels (a little
inaccurately, but only a little) as if the company has been ploughing
the same furrow for a few years now, material-wise. Polly Teale’s
dramatic biography of the literary sisters was premiered in 2005,
shortly after her
After Mrs Rochester mused on the Charlotte Brontė-influenced Jean Rhys and shortly before the company revived her adaptation of
Jane Eyre
itself. The emerging social identity of women in literature, both on
the page and as authors, seems to be the company’s principal thematic
field, and once again it’s not a severely under-cultivated one.
The
opening 20 minutes or so can require a little effort in attunement:
establishing the style of the piece and the baseline of biographical
information results in some unsubtleties. However, one comes to accept
the episodes in which Emily interacts with Cathy from
Wuthering Heights
or Charlotte is tarantella’d-around by the first Mrs Rochester,
symbolising the sensual life which the author considers closed to her.
The company of six work hard, with the non-sister players each taking
multiple roles: Mark Edel-Hunt, for instance, in one of Branwell
Brontė’s drunken scenes pre-echoes almost slurred-verbatim a moment
from
The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall
which he later enacts with Flora Nicholson as Anne and/or her
protagonist. In the circumstances, it feels as if faint or even
moderate praise is damning, but more than moderate praise would be
excessive.
Written for the Financial
Times.