Powerful Stuff In A Town Of
Glass
The Battle of Waterloo was restaged
last night at the Wyvern, Swindon between the Duke of Wellington and the
Duke of Northangerland, but it was difficult to see who had the final
victory.
The battlefield was a glass town,
where there was plenty of stone-throwing. And like the old proverb, the
self-destruction was almost as total as the annihilation of the enemy.
Miss Noel Robinson’s play, Glasstown, which runs all this week in Swindon, is a powerful study of one
of the most gifted quartets the English literary world has ever seen.
It is an emotional collage of the
Bronte family - buried alive and writhing in torments within a lonely
parsonage in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors.
Robert Powell played a Branwell
Bronte with one foot already in a boiling hell of his own imagination. As
the Duke of Northangerland, he strove to keep the cohorts of his mind under
control but finally they got the better of him.
Anne Stallybrass as his sister
Charlotte and childhood opponent, the Duke of Wellington, was also locked in
her own castle in the air, but through fighting with him, it seemed she
found the key and let herself out by the end of the play.
Close up of Anne with Robert Powell
Angela Down played a superbly
insular Emily, who pummelled pastry and washed floors, and never revealed
her emotional torments to the outside world.
Vicky Ireland as the consumptive,
saintly Anne erupted into superb hysteria when the emotional going got too
tough.
Daphne Heard as Tabby, the faithful
Yorkshire housekeeper, John Rowe as the new Irish curate, and John Robinson
as the blind and fading Patrick Bronte, were all excellent as crumbling
buttresses to a tumbling household.
The set - the complete ground floor
of the parsonage - was rather peculiarly without walls. Doors hung in
mid-air and the consequent open planning seemed out of keeping in a play
about such claustrophobia.
© Evening Advertiser, Swindon
15 May 1973
Glasstown