Watching
Blake Morrison’s clever, intelligent play (for the two are quite
different qualities), one is amazed that, until the writer and critic
Susannah Clapp suggested it to Morrison, no-one had hitherto explored
the correspondences between the Brontės of Haworth and the Prozorovs of
Chekhov’s classic drama. A trio of female siblings living far removed
from the bustling centre of their world, with which they have a
relationship that is largely only imaginary; a feckless brother who has
squandered his early promise in drink and gaming; a social circle
restrictive to the point of claustrophobia; above all, the
protagonists’ attempts to channel their intellectual and emotional
energies to avoid frustration and atrophy… in this case, of course, by
writing.
Morrison is detailed yet witty in his web of analogies.
He uses genuine figures from the Brontė sisters’ lives but plays with
chronology, invents personalities for the non-family members and
sometimes conflates characters from Chekhov. The “lovesick major”
Vershinin in
Three Sisters,
for instance, becomes the “lovesick curate” William Weightman, who also
has the main characteristics of the idealistic Tuzenbakh in Chekhov’s
play; Dr John Wheelhouse is both his Chekhovian counterpart Chebutykin
and the surly Solyony. Branwell Brontė’s sometime employer (and
probably lover) Lydia Robinson becomes a caricature even of Chekhov’s
Natasha, with Becky Hindley relishing her portrayal of vulgar and
misplaced snobbery. Every couple of minutes a line or a brief exchange
from Chekhov is recoined in a delicious alloy of familiarity and
novelty (“I tell you there are two art schools in London!”), but
Morrison also enjoys subverting our expectations by giving cues which
he then refuses to pay off. His fourth act departs from Chekhov’s
template almost entirely: the characters around the family, like the
soldiers stationed near the Prozorovs, all leave, but this is the act
in which the Brontė sisters directly address the issues of their
writing and its success, and their authorial identities… and two of
them visit London, which is two more than made it to Moscow in the
original.
Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company, concerned
as it is equally with the classics and with a distinctive Yorkshire
performance identity, is an ideal match for the play; Rutter directs
with deftness and plays the buffoonish teacher. And Morrison throws new
light from one point on to two great literary families, one historical,
the other fictional.
Written for the Financial
Times.