Underdog: The Other Other Bronte

[osprey_archer]

troisoiseaux kindly gifted me a month-long subscription of National Theater at Home for Christmas. I leapt on it like a rambunctious terrier, and at once watched Underdog: The Other Other Bronte.

In some ways I am the perfect viewer for this play, as I have read every published novel by the three Bronte sisters (haven’t ventured into the juvenilia, admittedly), am in the midst of a Charlotte reread, have visited the parsonage at Haworth and the graveyard in Scarborough where Anne is buried, etc.

On the other hand, I am perhaps not the ideal viewer for this play, as my reaction to both Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was, “Wow, the judgement of posterity was so colossally right about these books. They are boring and no one would be reading them if Anne weren’t the Third Bronte Sister.”

So actually I am totally on board with Anne’s reputation as Third and Least Literarily Interesting Bronte Sister! Nodding in agreement every time that Charlotte says something that implies that maybe she doesn’t take Anne’s writing seriously because Anne perhaps doesn’t write as well as Emily and Charlotte! Simply disagree with the play’s basic premise that Anne’s reputation is unjustly low because Charlotte suppressed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death.

Would it have been kinder and more sisterly if Charlotte let the publisher continue to print editions till the public got tired of the book on its own and let it sink into deserved obscurity? Sure. Do I think it’s a loss to literary history that she did not? No.

Having said that, for a play where I disagree with the basic premise, it was a lot of fun to watch. All three sisters are fantastic, and so is the energy between them, lending emotional weight to arguments about whether they are cooperating or competing or, perhaps, both? because maybe it’s possible for women to have complicated feelings about each other? for sisters to love each other but also feel jealous when one sister achieves the success that the other sister yearns for?

The staging is also amazing (although I was a little sad that the heather moor lasted for about two minutes at the start of the play!). The stage is a circle within a circle, and the outer ring revolves, so that when, for instance, Anne goes out to be a governess, she’s on a sort of treadmill, walking on the outer circle but staying in the same place as she and Charlotte read aloud the letters they wrote to each other.

Aside from the sisters and Branwell (who appears occasional to bewail the fact that he, too, is crushed by gender roles! Would rather paint than support his spinster sisters! Gonna go get drunk about it!), all the bit parts are played by four actors, who also sometimes act as a Greek chorus (quoting from reviews of the sisters’ book, for instance), and perform a lot of the work of a stage crew: striking together coconuts for the sound of the horses’ hooves as Anne and Charlotte head to London, for instance.

All in all, a good time! It didn’t change my mind about Anne Bronte’s literary reputation, but left me with a great enthusiasm to read my upcoming Bronte biographies and also watch more shows on National Theater at Home. This was not exactly what the creators were going for but I feel it was a great success nonetheless.

Comments

[kore]

It's well-written, but highly, highly unreliable. It's really a highly coloured historical novel, not a biography.

[osprey_archer]

My extremely vague knowledge of this book suggests to me that this is Daphne Du Maurier's tribute to one of her blorbos, so I know it needs to be taken with a shaker or two of salt.