Theatre review: Underdog: The Other Other Brontë

They might not be quite up there with Jane Austen in terms of enthusiastic fanbases undimmed through the centuries, but the Brontë sisters probably come in a close second, so Underdog: The Other Other Brontë seems a fairly safe bet to be a hit. Sarah Gordon's play is narrated by Charlotte (Gemma Whelan,) the oldest sister and the last to survive, and therefore the one who gets to decide how the authors will be remembered by history. And if Gordon's version of her is to be believed, that's exactly how she would have wanted it. With their alcoholic brother Branwell (James Phoon) getting through the family's money at a rate of knots, Charlotte, Emily (Adele James) and Anne (Rhiannon Clements) are pragmatic enough to plan how to make their own money.

This inevitably involves writing, which they’ve loved all their lives, but as women they won’t be welcomed into the establishment so they create aliases for themselves – the Bell brothers, who each submit a novel to publishers. At first with mixed success, but as their work becomes popular Charlotte and Anne toy with revealing their true identities, while also seeing their competitive relationship ramped up several notches.

So the title suggests the focus will be on Anne here (although I’m not sold on that title as I’d dispute the assumption that Emily is “the other one” in the first place,) but if there’s a particular through-line to Gordon’s play it’s the relationship between the oldest and youngest sister. If that’s the intention it’s weirdly done though, and it’s more as if the focus keeps shifting between the two. One of the early points of contention comes when publication of Anne’s first novel – intended as a polemic against the inequalities she saw when working as a governess – gets delayed, and Charlotte manages to rush out Jane Eyre, also about a governess who seems suspiciously like Anne herself. Anne accuses her of plagiarism, and when Agnes Grey finally comes out it’s treated as an inferior rip-off of her sister’s hit novel.

But as narrator Charlotte insists on pulling focus back to herself. In many ways it’s on-theme to how the play sees her: Charlotte reminds us early on that it’s a hard literary world for a woman to break into, and so all other women are competition. Underdog plays this out in microcosm with her sisters: Charlotte insists they’re strategising together with their plan to assume male names, but always steals their ideas and goes behind their backs to get the advantage. When her siblings die she edits their extant work to her liking, and bans Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from being reprinted. Whether it’s for her stated reason of preserving Anne’s reputation because of its lurid subject matter or, as the play suggests, because it had become more popular than her own books, it’s a pretty egregious action and arguably cements Anne’s status as the “other, other” one.

So Charlotte is presented as an overbearing, competitive narcissist, and without as strong a lead as Gemma Whelan in the role it would be a pretty hard sell to have someone like that narrating and dominating the play. It’s still often jarring to go from scenes that are starting to follow Anne and who she might actually have been to go back to Charlotte controlling the narrative and focusing it on herself, and I don’t know that Natalie Ibu’s production manages to control the whiplash in focus, or indeed in tone.

Because despite all the death and family conflict the play is largely a comedy that has the sisters speaking in decidedly 21st century language with plenty of swearing, which nicely sets up the contrast between the educated, erudite women the sisters were, and the remote, rugged upbringing in the Yorkshire moors they had. The comedy also goes off in more surreal directions, and the play features an ensemble of, for some reason, footmen (Nick Blakeley, Adam Donaldson, Kwaku Mills and Julian Moor-Cook) taking on all the bit-parts – a few possible suitors but mainly disdainful older women and spoilt children. It’s all entertaining, particularly a protracted gag that opens the second act as the sisters go on a very slow carriage ride to London, but again there’s a disconnect between the scenes and styles: In attempting to be both a biographical piece trying to understand the relationship between two of the Brontës, and a broadly comic, irreverent deconstruction of them, Underdog ends up being neither.

And while focusing on the “forgotten” Anne is an interesting angle, the apparent complete disinterest in Emily is downright weird. Obviously it can be easy to get distracted by the general air of gothic otherworldliness around the middle sister and end up focusing too much on her, and I don’t expect every take on her to feature her entirely historically-accurate adventures with a beatboxing dog, but James rather unfairly seems consigned to a bit-part, barely making more of an impact than the much-maligned Branwell. There’s a lot to enjoy in Underdog, and the cast members actually given a chance to shine do so, but at the same time it can’t decide quite how seriously it wants to take its alternative take on the Brontës, and doesn’t quite coalesce as a result.

Underdog: The Other Other Brontë by Sarah Gordon is booking until the 25th of May at the National Theatre’s Dorfman, then from the 7th to the 22nd of June at Northern Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Isha Shah.