Those of us with a hatred of costume drama are in good firm. Though the three actors of Stute theatre flip up for his or her tribute to the Brontë sisters, I Am No Hen, in regulation bonnets and traditionally correct cotton clothes, one thing is amiss.
After a reasonably piano music, they fight studying some Brontë prose. However the corsets are too tight and the temper too genteel. The passages come throughout as melodramatic the place they need to be impassioned. As a substitute of the maverick Brontës, they're giving us heritage theatre. It will possibly’t final.
In one thing of the iconoclastic spirit of Isobel McArthur’s Satisfaction and Prejudice* (*kind of), they strip again the trimmings of chocolate-box historical past in an try to seize what made the sisters putting within the first place. Breaking the principles was one in every of them. It isn’t lengthy earlier than they’re dropping the needlework in favour of speaking to the viewers, taking cellphone calls and showing to go off script.
In a cheerful hour-long present, they run briskly by way of the story of Charlotte, Anne and Emily – plus ambivalent point out of brother Branwell. They alight specifically on the recommendation of poet laureate Robert Southey that “literature can't be the enterprise of a lady’s life: and it ought to not be”. That was only a forewarning of the male-centric publishing trade and misogynistic press to return. Central to this all-female present is the precept of girls’s empowerment.
Sophia Hatfield, who co-writes with director Lisa Cagnacci, performs Charlotte as a lady torn between obedience and rebelliousness, attempting to maintain management of her personal play at the same time as she recognises the artistic disruptiveness of her sisters. “Is it advisable to convey somebody like Heathcliff into the world?” she asks Emily, unsure whether or not to be shocked or thrilled.
Claire-Marie Seddon’s Emily, the least conformist, has no time for such reticence. Emma Swan’s Anne is blissful to waft. When unsure, they whip out the trumpet, violin and clarinet, arrange a vocal loop and sing candy harmonies beneath the musical path of Farhaan Aamir Shah.
It makes for a vibrant and breezy present, however for all its anarchic impulses, it stays at coronary heart a biographical drama, devoted to the info as a lot because the feminism.
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