Miss Brontë

The literary output of the three Brontë sisters paints a varied picture of the inescapable confines of genteel rural poverty.  The authors well knew such poverty and its limitations on opportunity, and well knew too that marriage was the key to escaping it permanently, and that imagination was the key to doing so daily.  Mel Dodge’s script, featuring Charlotte Brontë’s words from letters and conversation, has Charlotte speak of their lives in detail, and particularly of their writing habits and of Charlotte’s abiding but doomed love.

Mel Dodge, who starred in this one-actress play, was energetic and emotional, sometimes addressing the audience as Emily or Anne, and at other times, after the loss of all her siblings, as the audience more generally.

Telling of a life interestingly and engagingly is challenging: there must be enough variety in mood and action to make it less than predictable, and the audience must feel that the story is being lived, not told.  Dodge carried this off spectacularly well.  At times it was difficult to believe that she was not truly weeping;  at other times, her anger, expressed in flinging papers or slamming books, was palpable.

Anybody interested in how some of the Brontës’ famous works, particularly those by Charlotte, came into being will find a treat in this insightful reliving of Charlotte’s life.

John P. Harvey