Staging the Brontës

Abstract

In March 2011, it was announced by Arts Council England that Shared Experience theatre company would not be included in its new national portfolio, and would therefore have its Arts Council funding cut completely from 2012 to 2015.¹ The company was in the midst of staging Brontë, a revival of its 2005 show by Polly Teale. The adaptation of Jane Eyre and its two related plays, After Mrs Rochester and Brontë, helped to underwrite a decade of successful touring, but, as this chapter will demonstrate, the plays have also absorbed and reflected some of the confusions and contradictions in British cultural attitudes towards the Brontë sisters, and towards their best-known works, particularly Jane Eyre. Here I will argue that the move from Jane Eyre to After Mrs Rochester and thence to Brontë is representative of a set of post-1960s cultural imperatives that have swelled audiences for theatre dealing with the Brontës’ work, while limiting the terms of engagement with it. In seeking to maintain the Arts Council’s funding for its ‘highly physical interpretations of classic novels’, Shared Experience has had to negotiate these limitations. It would not be uncharacteristic of Arts Council policy history if the theatre company was, cruelly, now being punished for it.²