We are Three Sisters E-Book

Blake Morrison

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Poet, playwright and novelist Blake Morrison evokes the lives of the Brontë sisters, with a nod to Chekhov's Three Sisters. Against the backdrop of a windswept northern village, three remarkable young women live their lives brightly. In Haworth in the 1840s, in a gloomy parsonage, where there are neither curtains nor comforts, Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë light up their world with outspoken wit, aspirations, dreams and ideas. And throughout their confined lives intensely lived… they write. With a touch of poetic licence, Morrison shows us the overwhelming humanity, charged emotions and brooding unease which characterise the Brontë household - and that of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Blake Morrison's play We Are Three Sisters was first performed at the Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, in 2011.

Leseprobe

Blake Morrison

WE ARE THREE SISTERS

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Original Production Details

Blake Morrison writes…

Notes from the Director…

Notes from the Designer…

In the beginning…

Author’s Note

Characters

We Are Three Sisters

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

We Are Three Sisters was first performed at the Viaduct Theatre, Dean Clough, Halifax on 9 September 2011. The cast was as follows:

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Catherine Kinsella

ANNE BRONTË

Rebecca Hutchinson

EMILY BRONTË

Sophia Di Martino

PATRICK BRONT

Duggie Brown

DOCTOR

John Branwell

TABBY

Eileen O’Brien

CURATE

Marc Parry

BRANWELL BRONTË

Gareth Cassidy

TEACHER

Barrie Rutter

LYDIA ROBINSON

Becky Hindley

Director

Barrie Rutter

Designer

Jessica Worrall

Lighting Designer

Tim Skelly

Sound Designer

Kraig Winterbottom

Music

Conrad Nelson

Production Photographs

Nobby Clark

Production Manager

Kay Burnett

Company Stage Manager

Guy Parry

Technical Manager

Richard Walker

Deputy Stage Manager

Bryony Rutter

Wardrobe Supervisor

Hannah Blake

Education

Deborah McAndrew

Blake Morrison writes…

Charlotte Brontë liked to give the impression nothing of interest ever happened to her and her sisters – Haworth being a remote spot, and life at the parsonage lacking in incident. And yet the lives of the Brontës have been retold – on stage, on film, in fiction, even as ballet – as often as their novels have been adapted. That’s because they raise such fascinating questions. How did three sisters come to write such groundbreaking novels? What was the chemistry between them? Why did they adopt pseudonyms? What experience, if any, did they have of being in love? How did they cope with their wayward, drug- and booze-addicted brother Branwell? How congenial was the influence of their father Patrick, whose health they constantly worried about, but who outlived them all? How feminist were they? How political in their thinking? Far from being uneventful, the lives of the Brontës are so full of psychological interest and dramatic potential that it’s hard to know where to start.

For me the starting point was Chekhov, whose play Three Sisters explores many of the themes that preoccupied the Brontës: work, education, marriage, the role of women, the dangers of addiction, the risks of flirtation, the rival claims of country and city, the stirrings of political unrest. The parallels are no mere coincidence. According to Chekhov’s biographer, Donald Rayfield, one of the books he ordered for the library of his home town, Taganrog, and which he kept for nearly a month before sending it on, was an account of the Brontës by Olga Peterson (a Russian married to an Englishman). The fact that Chekhov’s dancing teacher at school was a Greek called Vrondi, and in demotic Greek (which Chekhov knew a little) Brontë and Vrondi are virtual homonyms, may have tickled his fancy still further.

The immaculate structure of Chekhov’s play also attracted me. Its four acts span a period of four years, yet it feels much shorter, because it is so tight and focused. By using it as a template, I was forced to concentrate on a brief but intense phase of the Brontës’ lives, involving the fallout from Branwell’s affair with his employer, Mrs Robinson (a gift of a name), and the publication of Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s first novels. I’ve allowed myself some licence with chronology. But in effect the play occupies a few weeks in early 1848, with Chartist riots brewing in the background, and the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne (which occurred within a period of nine months) looming ahead.

The Brontë story is usually shrouded in darkness and misery. We are Three Sisters tries to disperse the gloom and to highlight resilience instead. Despite the tragic events of their childhood (the deaths of their mother and of two of their sisters), Charlotte, Emily and Anne were not pathetic victims of fate, but strong-minded, independent and resourceful women. Nor was Haworth a godforsaken spot in the back of beyond: as Juliet Barker shows in her marvellous biography of the Brontës, both the industry and the intellectual life of the region were thriving. Patrick Brontë has often been stereotyped as grim and reclusive. But he used his position to campaign fiercely for better education and sanitation for the people of Haworth. Another stereotype about the Brontës is their lack of humour. But there’s a playful air to some of Charlotte’s letters. I wouldn’t call We are Three Sisters a comedy, exactly, but with Chekhov’s encouragement I’ve tried to let in a little lightness.

Chekhov’s three sisters pine for ‘Moscow, Moscow, Moscow’. The Brontë sisters were more ambivalent about London, but when her friend Ellen Nussey failed to be moved by a visit there, Charlotte told her off: ‘Had you no feeling of intense, and ardent interest, when in St James’s you saw the Palace, where so many of England’s kings had held their Courts?… You should not be too much afraid of appearing country-bred. The magnificence of London… is to me almost as apocryphal as Babylon, or Nineveh, or ancient Rome.’

Wherever possible, I’ve tried to be true to the Brontës’ thoughts and feelings. As well as drawing on Juliet Barker’s biography, I’ve used words that appear in the novels, Charlotte’s letters, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography. Here, for example, is Gaskell’s account of Charlotte telling her father about Jane Eyre:

‘Papa, I’ve been writing a book.’

‘Have you, my dear?’

‘Yes, and I want you to read it.’

‘I’m afraid it will try my eyes too much.’

‘But it is not in manuscript: it is printed.’

‘My dear! You’ve never thought of the expense it will be!…

’ This episode has been imported into the play almost verbatim. So has Charlotte’s account of the trip she and Anne took to London in order to reveal their identities to their publishers – ‘We are three sisters’ – and how betrayed Emily felt as a result.

For me, We are Three Sisters is a kind of homecoming. I grewup within striking distance of Haworth, in an old rectory at the top of a village and with a view out onto moors. And when the composer Howard Goodall approached me with the idea of collaborating on a musical of Wuthering Heights back in the 1980s, I was quick to accept. Leicester Haymarket Theatre seemed interested in staging it. But there were five musical versions of Wuthering Heights doing the rounds at the time, and in the end it was Tim Rice’s Heathcliff, starring Cliff Richard, that prevailed. I thought that was the end of my relationship with the Brontës. But thanks to Susannah Clapp (who first suggested the idea a decade ago) and Barrie Rutter (who nagged me to get on with it last year), here I am involved with them again. It’s good to be back.

Blake Morrison and Barrie Rutter

Notes from the Director…

The three weird sisters of Macbeth; Lear’s three daughters; the Fates: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos; The Gorgon sisters: Stheno, Euryale and Medusa; the three sisters from Native American agriculture: maize, squash and beans; the Furies: Tisiphone, Megara and Thalia; and the three Chekhov Sisters themselves… not to mention the Three Degrees, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Beverley Sisters or the much trampled slopes of the Three Sisters in Glencoe and yet and yet… the three most famous sisters of all are just up the road in Haworth! Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë; Yorkshire lasses, authors, pioneers; three young women absorbed in an exuberant childhood and wild, imaginative games who would grow to astonish the literary, male leaseholders of nineteenth-century Britain with their publications of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Yorkshire-born poet and author Blake Morrison has provided his sixth play for Broadsides; Yorkshire-born self-confessed Brontë nut Jessica Worrall has designed the set and costumes; Yorkshire-born scholar and internationally recognised authority on the Brontës, Juliet Barker, has intrepidly offered comments as the fusion between Chekhov and history took shape; and then me! Yorkshire-born and leagues behind the above in Brontë knowledge, but at the helm of this production and improving my affinity and affection for the sisters with each new page and rewrite of this script.

Enjoy!

Barrie Rutter

Sophia Di Martino, Rebecca Hutchinson and Catherine Kinsella

Notes from the Designer…

As a long-term admirer of the Brontë sisters and their work, it was with a veritable air of excitement that I first became involved in working with Blake and Barrie on this new play. The excitement was easy to understand: anything that involved endless hours conjuring up images and ideas of the Brontës was hardly a difficult undertaking, but what was surprising and totally unexpected was the accompanying sense of trepidation, almost a fear, that seemed to come from a growing sense of responsibility, which I felt not only to the subjects and their work but also to the long-cherished visions that I have of them and the important role they have played in my life.

My admiration began when I first read Jane Eyre, a momentous event in any young girl’s life, swiftly followed by my first visit to the parsonage and the waiting world of all things Brontë; that seemingly endless climb up and up the narrow lanes over the cobblestones, until finally you reach the house, perched precariously between open moor and closed graves. Strangely imposing from the outside (even without the extension built after the Brontës’ occupation), I think it works more as a kind of inverted tardis, impossibly small on the inside, everything in its place, neat as a pin but scarcely enough room for a family with six children. Even after the loss of their mother and two elder sisters, it must have still felt full of life, bursting at the seams with the never-ending ideas and stories of Charlotte, Emily and Anne; it seems incredible that the whole of Haworth didn’t know about them, let alone their father.

It was thinking of the three girls and that dual reality of their visible and secret lives that influenced my approach to the design. I wanted to blend the external and internal – firstly in a practical sense, merging the contained parameters of their home with the wider and wilder context of both the social and natural worlds in which it stands; but secondly, avoiding an overly literal representation of the dining room at the parsonage where most of the play takes place. Whilst veracity of period and place was vital, it also seemed important to incorporate some semblance of those now-familiar literary places the sisters brought into being in their nightly wanderings round and around the table; Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, Thornfield. The solution seemed to lie in creating something both practical yet emotional, functional yet psychological.

I found the same approach suited the costumes. Whilst keeping strictly to period, it was hard to ignore the descriptions of some of their supposed literary counterparts – who can forget Jane Eyre’s description of herself as ‘obscure, plain and little’. The inevitable comparisons we draw from the novels is perhaps understandable given the scarcity of actual images of the family: a couple of (disputed) photographs of Charlotte, a few sketches and caricatures, and of course the famous pillar portrait of the three sisters by their brother. However badly executed, it is nevertheless something truly to thank the hapless Branwell for.

The other details I have kept are both Brontëan and Chekhovian. Emily’s outdated dresses, her refusal to wear a corset and the required amount of petticoats; Patrick’s large necktie worn to ward off infection, and Mrs Robinson’s green dress, the colour often used by Chekhov to symbolise death or bad luck and worn by Natasha in Three Sisters.

I hope that this combination of fact and fiction, of reality and imagination, echoes the nature of both Blake’s play and the Brontë sisters themselves.

Jessica Worrall

In the beginning…

It first hit me about ten years ago. Watching Three Sisters – was it at the Lyceumin Edinburgh or at the Chichester Festival Theatre? – something tugged at me: it was as if I wereseeing the play in unexpected binocular vision, or sensing a shadow behind the action. The family arrangement – three gifted sisters and a revered but hopeless brother– struck me as familiar.As did their longing. And their claustrophobia.

And then I got it. Charlotte and Emily and Anne, with Branwell hovering around as an unfulfilled genius. It was the Brontës. I didn’t know then, as I would have had I read more of Chekhov’s letters or studied the biographies, that the Brontës were if not exactly a source, at least an influence on the playwright when he wrote Three Sisters. I took the echo as being yet another sign of Chekhov’s extraordinary power, another empathetic leap. And I mentioned it to Blake Morrison.

Why to Blake? Well, we are friends, and I’d much admired the work he had done in bringing classical dramas to vivid Yorkshire life with Northern Broadsides. I was particularly stirred by his West Riding version of Oedipus, which gives Sophocles’ terrifying tale a wild but homely setting and his characters a particular mental landscape, one in which a bad marriage is ‘a stormy moortop of bramble and gorse’.

I wasn’t proposing that the Brontës should be whisked off to Russia, nor that silver birches and samovars should be dropped on Haworth; I was simply fascinated by the correspondence between these two sets of sisters and couldn’t shake off the resonance. I didn’t know what to do with it, though. Nor did Blake, who was intrigued but thought the whole thing a bit ‘bonkers’. We had a couple of chats about the sibling trios, the last over an un-Russian, un-Victorian coffee and cake in a Southwark café – and then we let it drop.