Explosive Life
In The Bronte Household
“Glasstown” is a play
of love and hatred, of five people living together in close
proximity making continual demands on each other. A play of
hungry egotism. Also, and almost incidentally, it is a play
about the home life of Charlotte Bronte.
This explosive play by
Noel Robinson is at the Kings Theatre, Southsea, this week with
a cast including Anne Stallybrass and Robert Powell.
Branwell Bronte, the
favoured son of a family of three girls returns home with his
mild sister from her position as governess.
Eldest sister Charlotte
is obviously in charge of the family and their blind father.
Emily, who isolates herself in the kitchen, is not so much the
drudge, but the only self-possessed member of a talented,
confused group.
The father in his
blindness, Emily and Anne in their “games”, Charlotte in her
letters, and Branwell in his fantasy love affair - each member
of the family builds a retreat from the others.
But isolated in their
own “castles in the air” they attempt continually to force
reality upon each other, to satisfy their own needs.
Branwell, the drunkard,
is sacrificed for all of them to exercise their pity, their
power, or their sympathy on. He even despises himself.
But this tale of mutual
exploitation is gloriously lightened by some funny scraps of
dialogue, and irreverence by the charming Branwell.
Hungry and grasping the
characters may be, but they are completely convincing, and each
of them has a thread of humanity that makes them sympathetic
characters.
© The News
19 June 1973
Bronte Family
Comes to Life
Interest in the
brilliant, tragic Bronte family never ceases. The drama of their
lives in bleak Haworth Parsonage is for ever fascinating. So, as
a devotee of the Brontes and their works, I started with an
initial feeling in favour of Noel Robinson’s play “Glasstown”,
presented and directed by Frith Banbury at the Kings Theatre,
Southsea, this week.
It only remained for me
to decide whether or not the play deals worthily with its
subject. In my view, it does. I found the production and the
acting engrossing right up to the final moment when Emily, the
solitary, the individualist, is left alone with her demented,
fantasy-ridden brother.
As soon as the curtain
rose, I found myself in imagination, transported back to Haworth
Parsonage, to which I made the pilgrimage a few years ago. The
atmosphere is exactly right, and Bob Ringwood’s design, with its
inclusion of hall, kitchen, and living room, captures the
material aspect and spirit of the Parsonage perfectly.
The play is called
“Glasstown” because it has as its starting point the imaginary
history created by the young Brontes and shows how the would-be
writer Branwell never ceased to live in a world of his own,
filled with romantic notions, and imagining himself as a kind of
second Byron.
It is an actor’s play
offering splendid parts, and it is acted in a strong style which
reaches great heights of drama and never falls into bathos.
Pivot of the play is Branwell, drunk on the cheap gin of his day, drugged with opium,
extravagant in his gestures, living recklessly in his own
infernal world as he mocks the infernal world of the orthodox
religionists. Robert Powell is magnificent in this role; before
our eyes we see Branwell deteriorates, grows thinner and
increasingly ill; the roaring boy becomes a weeping misfit who
has never grown up.
Anne Stallybrass plays
Charlotte, the most sensible and practical, though not the
greatest genius, of the three sisters, with the memory of her
love for her employer in Brussels always secretly threatening to
break passionately into the mundane and often morbid life of
Haworth.
Miss Stallybrass’s
Charlotte is exactly as I have always imagined her: the “plain
Jane” capable of great devotion and passion yet striving to
control everything because of her responsibilities.
These are the key
performances, but there is much to admire in John Robinson’s
rugged, strong-minded Rev. Patrick Bronte, so sadly ignorant of
the faults of Branwell, and regarding him as the true genius of
the family. Angela Down plays Emily, quiet, intense, withdrawn
and very much the individualist, who writes only to please
herself. Vicky Ireland is the gentle Anne, the pious, sweet
sister for whom I have always had a soft spot. John Rose plays
the Rev. Arthur Nichols, and there’s a “champion” performance by
Daphne Heard as the bluntly-spoken no-nonsense Yorkshire
servant, Tabby.
I left the theatre
feeling that I had really met all these characters, hitherto
known to me only through books.
© Hampshire
Telegraph
21 June 1973
Glasstown