© Charles Lewsen,
The Times
11 July 1973
Evening News
It is no mean feat to
carve out a believable play from the hell touched with divinity
that was Haworth Parsonage, the Yorkshire home of the Bronte
family.
The setting and
characters are starkly real, but like Emily’s Wuthering Heights
and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, they are touched with melodrama. We
see them as if by flashes of lightning.
It is hard to imagine
anything more depressing than the Brontes’ life on the moors and
the bleak early Victorian parsonage where the blind Rev. Patrick
Bronte lives with his three frustrated daughters and a wastrel
son.
A childhood in which
they created a fantasy world called Glasstown has soured in
later life.
But gloom does not
beget gloom. In her first stage play, Noel Robinson makes
everything the Brontes do and say intensely interesting despite
their unhappy existence.
The action is confined
to the year 1845 - 46 when, under the pseudonyms of Currer,
Ellis and Acton Bell, the three sistes published their first
poem - and year before their great flowering as novelists.
The girls’ confined
lives revolve round their father whom John Robinson plays with a
tortured rectitude and Branwell (Robert Powell) their brother,
sneering and cynical, rolling back drunk from the village inn.
The great scene is when
Charlotte, whom Anne Stallybrass makes a stern realistic head of
the family, forces the weak, vacillating Branwell to face the
truth about his life after years of self deception.
Mr. Powell’s portrait
of the wretched Branwell is painted in strong colours but is
completely convincing; so, too, are Angela Down as the
tight-lipped Emily and Vicky Ireland’s pretty monosyllabic Anne.
And there is a perfect
assumption of good-willed stupidity by John Rowe as Nicholls the
curate whom Charlotte, beautifully played by Miss Stallybrass,
eventually marries.
All the cobwebs and
falsities that generally encumber historical stage biography are
swept away in Frith Banbury’s careful, sensitive production of
this excellent play.
© Felix Barker,
Evening News
11 July 1973
Brontes’ Year
“Glasstown”, the first
stage play by the Australian writer Noel Robinson, was given its
London premiere at the Westminster on July 10 and proved in some
respects to be a disappointing debut. In choosing a theme so
historically well documented as a year in the life of the
Brontes, the author may have done herself a disservice. Stick to
the facts, and the knowledgeable observer will complain that
there is nothing new here; divert from them and the same
beholder will cry out against misrepresentation.
My own dissatisfaction
lies in a disability which this author shares with the majority
in these television-ridden days; a total inability to write a
good curtain-line. There is not one of the six scene endings in
this play which would not be an excellent dissolve into another
scene, and not one which makes a pleasing or convincing
theatrical break.
The characters,
however, are well handled indeed. Charlotte, beautifully played
by Anne Stallybrass, is the domineering sister, much as one
expects her to be, as is the drearily pathetic Anne, well
characterised by Vicky Ireland. Robert Powell, ideally cast as
Branwell, shows him as likeable, human and unexpectedly witty,
and John Robinson, as the blind Rev. Patrick Bronte, excellently
personifies that rather objectionable paterfamilias.
But for me the
performance of the play, as regards both the writing and the
acting, was Angela Down’s Emily, hitherto thought of as a spiky,
cross-grained creature and here shown as a fine, calm,
self-isolationist endeavouring with dignity to preserve her
right to solitude within the hugger-mugger confines of a
typically interfering family more thrown in upon itself than
most.
The beautifully
expressive restraint of Miss Down’s interpretation is a
memorable part of Frith Banbury’s admirable production.
© The Stage and
Television Today
19 July 1973