Brontë/ Project Arts Centre: From its stunningly dull title and from the blurb in the Dublin Theatre Festival programme, Polly Teale's play might seem to be one of those exercises in infotainment for people too lazy to read, or yet another unwanted adjunct to the Brontë industry.
Just two words suggest otherwise: Shared Experience. Over the past 30 years, the English company has earned its reputation for both distinctiveness and excellence. Its stripped-down style of minimal lighting, on-stage costume changes and direct engagement with the audience has been enormously influential. Its rigorous avoidance of illusion and trickery has allowed the company to develop a paradoxical speciality: literary adaptations that achieve a pure theatricality.
Having staged prose works from The Arabian Nights to War and Peace, Shared Experience has gradually extended its remit from the books to their creation. Teale's highly successful After Mrs Rochester dealt with the influence of Jane Eyre on Jean Rhys. Now, in Brontë, she moves further back, exploring the creation of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. How, she asks, did three virgin sisters, living in relative isolation and subordinated to their father and brother, come to create such fiercely imagined works?
Or, as Matthew Thomas's drunken, jealous Branwell mockingly inquires of Charlotte in the most violent and gruelling scene, "What do you know about life?". The answer that unfolds is the simple and affecting one that the downtrodden have always been able to give: absence is sometimes even more potent than presence.
Teale's delicate task is to evoke through what we see - the daily drudgery of the sisters' lives - all that we do not see: the desires, ambitions and fantasies that fill the vacuum. There are moments when the ennui is all too vividly evoked. Sometimes, too, the desires and frustrations embodied by Natalia Tena, who appears alternately as Cathy and as Mrs Rochester stalking the real-life action, are too crudely dramatised. But for the most part this is a lucid, engaging and moving reflection on the contrary relationship between life and art.
It helps greatly that Teale is both joint artistic director of Shared Experience and the director of this production, for what makes Brontë work is the seamless fusion of text and production. Angela Davies's design, using images by the wonderful Paula Rego, makes few concessions to realism, allowing a fluid movement between external actuality and internal imagination.
The actors occupy this space with grace and confidence. Catherine Cusack as Anne, Fenella Woolgar as Charlotte and the outstanding Diana Beck as Emily are completely convincing as siblings who live in each other's pockets and at the same time so beautifully varied that they give a rich diversity to outwardly dull lives. The strangeness, as well as the magnificence, of the sisters' collective achievement is fully honoured.
Runs until Sat
• The Dublin Theatre Festival runs to Oct 15. Bookings on 01-6778899, or at www.dublintheatrefestival.com
