"How did it happen? How was it possible?" Those are the questions posed at the start of Polly Teale's investigation of the Brontë legend for Shared Experience. But, despite some dubious Freudian tactics borrowed from her earlier version of Jane Eyre, I can't say I felt much closer to the source of the sisters' creativity after two-and-a-half hours.
What the production does offer is an impressionistic biography of the Brontë sisters and their tragically curtailed lives. And, for the most part, it avoids sentimental cliche. The father, Patrick, is not the usual tyrannical cleric but a moderately considerate parent. The dissolute brother, Branwell, complains that his sisters do not wish for his success: he was conspicuously excluded from the first publication of their work in 1846. And Charlotte's love-hate relationship with Emily is faithfully portrayed: she both dissociates herself from Wuthering Heights and, after Emily's death, burns her second novel.
But, although Teale's pell-mell production avoids the Hollywood biopic approach, it gives each sister one dominant characteristic. Charlotte is the iron-willed, practical achiever, Emily the tormented genius and night-wanderer and Anne the embodiment of social conscience. But no mention is made of Villette, based on Charlotte's romantic fixation with her Brussels mentor. And Charlotte's Shirley, one of the great English social novels, is equally excluded from consideration.
Teale's most questionable device is to embody key characters from the books as if they represented the author's sub-conscious. As Emily writes Wuthering Heights, we see Cathy burning with desire for Heathcliffe and yearning for bird-like freedom. Even more questionably, Bertha in Jane Eyre is treated as the animalistic, sexual side of Charlotte that is suppressed by life at Haworth Parsonage. But although Natalia Tena as the symbol of the sisters' hidden selves, crawls on the floor and chews the banisters, I was unconvinced. It gives what Jonathan Miller once called an "impudent visibility" to the sisters' inner lives.
The irony is that it is precisely that creative power Teale purports to celebrate. When Branwell returns home distraught by the collapse of a love affair, Emily compassionately says "we can only try to imagine" his suffering.
The show is staged with the adroitness we expect of Shared Experience. Fenella Woolgar conveys admirably Charlotte's sense of purpose, Diane Beck suggests Emily's isolated strangeness and Catherine Cusack's Anne catches the character's commitment to social reality. David Fielder significantly plays all the male figures who dominated Charlotte's life and Matthew Thomas is a suitably despairing Branwell. It's an entertaining evening; but the origin of the Brontë's creative power is unresolved.
· Until November 26. Box office: 020-8741 2311.
