REVIEW: INFERNAL by Harry Harding at White Bear Theatre 6 – 10 August 2024

‘Promising play about the forgotten Brontë’ ★★☆☆☆

Of all the Brontë’s, Branwell the troubled maverick brother, is arguably the most interesting. A talented artist who earned a place at the Royal Academy to paint but got no further than the Castle Tavern in Holborn, he struggled with addiction, mental health issues and had an intense relationship with his sister, Emily, author of Wuthering Heights. This Victorian rebel without a cause, who died young, is the least celebrated of the Brontë’s and shrouded in mystique - an alluring subject for interpretation.

Infernal, written and directed by Harry Harding brings audiences into the imagined life of the inhabitants of the Bronte Parsonage where this talented and creative family lived together on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. It’s clear which sister is which because Charlotte Bronte – played with stern forbearance by Katie Hart looks like a school governess with wire rimmed spectacles. (She wrote Jane Eyre about a school governess.) Emily, meanwhile, played by Lillie Prowse spends the entire play barefoot like the free and wild Cathy of her eponymous gothic novel.

Tortured Branwell meanwhile is haunted by demons: laudanum is one devil, alcohol another and he spends much of his time at The Bull, his local tavern becoming inebriated. The lurching, emotional, unfulfilled sibling, who always feels like the family's failure, is a constant concern to his siblings as he struggles to create anything of significance. The closeness between he and Emily is postulated to the nth degree offering a brooding and borderline incest story, weirdly uncomfortable to watch.

 

Some of the performances are strong in this ensemble piece and it’s beautiful to hear the Yorkshire brogues of the cast alongside the Irish accent of Papa Bronte – whose real name was Patrick Brunty but decided Brontë was more suitable and genteel. True to the wishes of the Bronte sisters, their words enabled them to live forever and the fascinating life of this family, enshrined at Haworth’s Bronte Parsonage which may have been the inspiration for this play, gets a dramatic thumbs up from Infernal where at one point, the past merges with the present.

Directorially and technically, there are some jarring moments. The scramble of words in the opening voiceover was almost impossible to hear and decipher. One assumes these were Branwell’s words, but these were unfortunately lost in the ether. The interminable apple peeling scene that opens the play was beyond mediative and became an endurance test as audiences waited for the action to ‘start’. There were some lighting glitches where changes seemed to happen for no reason and the use of music was sometimes intrusive and relied on too heavily to convey emotional weight. Hopefully, some of these things might be ironed out with further development in this promising homage to the Bronte sisters and their forgotten brother.

INFERNAL

White Bear Theatre 6 – 10 August 2024

Box Office https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/infernal%3A-a-bronte-story

Written and directed by Harry Harding

Director/Producer Harry Harding

Sound Design by Katie Hart

Lighting and Sound by Will Muir

The Company

Lillie Prowse as Emily Bronte

Jed McLoughlin as Joseph Leyland/Patrick Bronte

Griffin James as Branwell Bronte

Katie Hart as Charlotte Bronte