Breathing life into the Brontes

Writer-director Polly Teale's visit to the Bronte family's Yorkshire home ended in an unexpected manner. She was staying the night at Haworth parsonage to soak up the atmosphere for her new play, Bronte, about the life and work of literature's most famous sisters.

"I crept into the graveyard in the middle of the night to look at the house in darkness - and ended up terrifying myself and running back to the house," she recalls.

She became fascinated by the three sisters after adapting Jane Eyre for Shared Experience, the company of which she's joint artistic director, ten years ago. Then she wrote the award-winning After Mrs Rochester, a prequel to Jane Eyre telling the story of the mad woman in the attic before her confinement.

"The new piece is going back to base and looking at the Brontes' own lives," she explains. "The question I had in my mind was how was it possible for these three Victorian spinsters, who lived in isolation in Yorkshire, with very limited life experience and no sexual experience as far as we know, how did they manage to write these powerful, passionate books? The play is an attempt to answer that." The starting point is the house in Haworth on the Yorkshire Moors as their brother Branwell returns home in disgrace, both an alcohol and drug addict and having been dismissed from his post after an affair with the mistress of the house. As he descended into alcoholism and insanity, his sisters wrote their novels.

Teale, who comes from Sheffield, says one possible reason for the sisters' inspiration is the simplest. "Their mother died when they were tiny and their father was a remarkable man who was born an Irish peasant, taught himself to read and write, and ended up going to Cambridge. He was a great believer in the power of literature and art to transform, and that passion was planted in them when they were young," she says.

"Girls at that time were encouraged to read, but in a narrow way. The Bronte sisters read everything. The combination of not having a mother's influence, their father's love of literature and their brother's behaviour is fascinating.

"Branwell was really a crucial influence on them all because he was expected to achieve great things, but became an alcoholic, drug addict and, towards the end of his life, a paranoid schizophrenic. They saw his slide into insanity, something you see reflected in the novels. And he was a strong influence on the men in the books, like Heathcliff. The other element is that he was very charming and had lots of affairs with women. Through him, they vicariously experienced that or became aware of that."

She believes that living in isolation may have had an effect on their work too, as they made up for their dreary real life by writing about an imaginary world of passion and romance.

Teale, whose other work with Shared Experience includes adaptations of A Passage To India and War And Peace, mixes both the real and the imagined worlds of the Brontes in the play.

Characters from their novels appear alongside Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who are played by Fenella Woolfar, Diane Beck and Catherine Cusack.

She thinks it's very much in the style of previous Shared Experience productions, being both naturalistic and physical theatre. "The reason it's right for us to tell this story is that you have to be able to make visual all the stuff that was going on inside these women's minds," she says. "The reality of their lives is that they were very dreary at the time. It's about the collision between real and imagined."

As well as West Yorkshire Playhouse, the tour of Bronte takes in a visit to York Theatre Royal for the first time in one of a number of Yorkshire dates. "We were really keen to make sure we got a good number of dates there because it feels absolutely right for the play," says Teale.

* Bronte is at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from Tuesday to September 17 (tickets 0113-213 7700) and at York Theatre Royal from October 11 to 15 (tickets 01904 623568).