Significant Events: The Full Brontë
This article was published in 2022 in the SJT CircularThe Full Brontë
by Simon MurgatroydGiven Scarborough's connection to the famed Brontë sisters, it's perhaps no surprise theatre in the round in Scarborough has often turned to the literary family for inspiration.
Either through adaptations of the sisters famed works or dramas chronicling their own lives in Haworth, there have been plays relating to the Brontes practically since the creation of Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre in 1955.
The following year, Stephen Joseph directed an adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Jurneman Winch. Jurneman was actually the pseudonym for Joan Winch, who wrote all her plays under a male pen-name, presumably as she felt it gave her a better chance of her writing being noticed.
In that, of course, she was similar to the Brontë sisters who were all initially published under pen-names. Charlotte as Currer Bell, Emily as Ellis Bell and Anne as Acton Bell.
Wuthering Heights also marked the first time the Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre company organised a press shoot with Stephen Joseph accompanying its two stars, Shirley Jacobs and John Rees, to the Moors for photographs of him ‘directing’ the pair.
Stephen Joseph himself obviously enjoyed Joan’s adaptation of the play as he revived it in 1960 as one of two revivals to mark the company’s sixth anniversary (quite why sixth and not fifth, we'll never know!)
This time the role of Heathcliff was taken by Alan Ayckbourn - then only just beginning his journey as a playwright and more interested in acting. The Stage review noted that ‘Alan Ayckbourn makes a bold and vigorous Heathcliff’ and the play’s run was extended after the other revival - ‘Prentice Pillar - which had its own run cut short.
Alan recalls the Scarborough Evening News thought gave him a rather poor review and he promptly called the editor demanding to speak to the reviewer. Somewhat awkwardly, the editor said that was not possible until after 4pm. Why? demanded Alan. That would be because she was in school....
It transpired the normal reviewer had had to cover a football match at the last minute and had asked a girl he knew to review the play. Alan was somewhat deflated at having been given one of his poorest reviews by someone not yet out of school and let it be.
Fifteen years later, the first of two plays produced by the company which portrayed the life of the famed family was premiered. Brontës was written by Bob Eaton and Peter Clough and opened at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre in September 1975.
Notably, Malcom Hebden - a long-standing member of the company and, later, of Coronation Street fame - made his acting debut with the company, playing the brother, Branwell.
The play was written to tie in with a Brontë festival being held in Scarborough that year and featured a number of the sister’s poems set to music and sung. The play was reported to have been a notable success by several newspapers, which - sadly - is more than can be said for its successor.
A decade later in 1985, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round put the sisters centre-stage again with a hugely ambitious production, The Brontës of Haworth.
This was a two-part play adapted from Christopher Fry’s popular 1973 television series of the same name. It featured the largest company to have performed at either the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round or Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre with 18 actors playing 55 different roles!
One of the essential elements in promoting the play was the hope it would attract school parties on the matinee performances. Unfortunately, there were mass teachers’ strikes that year and Alan Ayckbourn, who directed it, recalls there were frequently less people in the audience than on-stage!
Reviews were mixed and those that did see it - if the several letters published in the Scarborough Evening News are to be believed - enjoyed the show, but it was regarded as a substantial and high profile failure for the company.
The final home-produced Brontë work is a curious piece - relatively recent but probably not well remembered - and arguably one of the least well-known Brontë works.
Villette opened at the SJT in October 2005 and was this company’s first and final collaboration with the renowned physical theatre company, Frantic Assembly. The piece, written by Lisa Evans, was an unusual dance / drama hybrid adaptation of Charlotte’s novel. The reviews weren’t bad, but it failed to strike a note with audiences and was, sad to say, not terribly successful.
There was also a rather unusual look at the lives of the Brontës in 2011, presented by the Northern Broadsides. Blake Morrison’s We Are Three Sisters essentially re-imagined Chekhov’s classic Three Sisters in Haworth with the Brontës as the titular characters. It had a cameo by Barrie Rutter, which was sure to be a performance of quiet subtlety....
Away from the theatre, Scarborough itself, of course, has its own famous, if somewhat tragic, connection to the Brontës.
Anne regularly came to visit the town as a governess between 1840 and 1844 and became very fond of the town using it as an inspiration for her own writing. Later, with her health failing after a diagnosis of tuberculosis, Anne decided to ‘take the waters’ at Scarborough Spa in 1849, arriving on 25 May and staying at Wood’s Lodging - the site upon which the Grand Hotel stands today.
She visited the Spa on 26 May but collapsed outside her lodgings on the way back and the next day a doctor confirmed her death was imminent. She died on Monday 28 May 1849, aged 29 - not 28 as was incorrectly recorded and then put on the gravestone. Despite being buried at St Mary’s Church, notably Anne’s funeral service took place at the long since demolished Christ Church on Vernon Road, next to what would later become the Library Theatre.
Article by and copyright of Simon Murgatroyd. Please do not reproduce this article without permission of the copyright holder.