Underdog: The Other Other Brontë at the National Theatre – review

Sarah Gordon’s new play about the Brontë sisters (which won the 2020 Nick Darke Award) is a conundrum. It’s written with passion and wit, yet somehow leaves its subjects diminished. It seeks to introduce new audiences to the power and innovation of the three pioneering novelists who imagined whole worlds from a cloistered Yorkshire parsonage, yet doesn’t quite make the case for their significance. It’s an enjoyable romp but doesn’t peer beneath the surface of its suggestion of a society that holds women writers back.

It begins with Gemma Whelan’s energetically impassioned Charlotte striding through the audience demanding to know which is our favourite Brontë novel. Almost inevitably – though sometimes the men have to be prompted by the women around them to say this – it is her own Jane Eyre, the story of a traduced governess who finds happiness with the darkly mysterious Mr Rochester.

Yet the play’s central thesis builds on more modern scholarship which suggests that Anne, the youngest of the three sisters who died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, is the most radical and that her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, about violence and addiction (and based on the sisters’ own struggles with their brother Branwell) deserves wider attention.

Designer Grace Smart sets the sisters chattering and arguing in a semi-circular cockpit, with wooden walls and a revolve that brings in both furniture and a sequence of hopeless and hapless men, playing many parts, but always holding power. Initially, the scene is covered with the beautiful flora of the moors around their Haworth home; this rises above them as the action starts.

The tone of this co-production with Northern Stage is both jokey and wild, Natalie Ibu’s direction confident and fleet. Whelan, best known for Game of Thrones and Upstart Crow, is commanding as she turns Charlotte into a monster, so driven by her ambition to be in the male-dominated room where it happens that she rides rough-shod over her sisters’ talents to get there.

It’s a tribute to her performance that she never entirely loses our sympathy; the running joke about her hating her appearance as depicted by Branwell’s portrait underlines Charlotte’s sense of being diminished because she is always judged by her appearance.  But the play’s depiction of her stealing Anne’s ideas (to adopt male pseudonyms, to write about the plight of a governess) makes her hard to forgive.

Rhiannon Clements makes Anne a shining beacon of goodness, always the conciliator between her two warring sisters, but gives her just enough spirit to be believable. Adele James brings deep emotion to the under-written part of Emily, author of Wuthering Heights, who rather gets squeezed out of the play’s central thesis.

There are some excellent jokes – a very slow carriage ride to London, depicted by two wheels and coconut shells, a flouncing Mrs Gaskell (Nick Blakeley), determined to make Charlotte such a saint that it will secure her place in the pantheon – and everything whips along so stylishly that it could probably be played without an interval.

But what goes missing amidst the humour and the sisterly squabbling, is the sense that the Brontës did actually deserve their place in the literary canon. The debunking of the mythology that has grown up around them, sweeps their achievements out with the bathwater. It doesn’t really matter who was the most talented sister or who did what to whom. The idea that for one woman to be celebrated, one hundred must be ignored goes under-explored. The fact remains that against the odds all three sisters produced some of the most durable writing of the 19^th century.