...according to director of Nottingham play

The Brontë's have become icons of feminism; authors of two books that are forerunners of chick lit and feature some of the greatest Romantic heroes and heroines of the 19th century.

Almost every A-level English Literature student has read either Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights; fewer know Anne's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, a passionate attack on the attitudes of a society that forced both boys and girls to conform to fixed gender stereotypes.

Still fewer know anything of Charlotte's other novels or Emily's poems, many of which were edited by Charlotte after her sister's death to make them more acceptable to the Victorian public.

Three daughters and one son survived childhood. The girls spent most of their lives in the parsonage in a remote, unhealthy, industrial Yorkshire village, looking after their nearly blind father, with little contact with the outside world beyond largely unsuccessful spells as governess or teacher.

When they eventually published a volume of their poems, it had to be under male pseudonyms.

Charlotte, the eldest, was desperate to be known and terrified of anything that might damage their reputation; Emily wrote to escape from the pressures of life and didn't care about being published; Anne was concerned about inequality and hoped to change society.

And then there was their brother, Branwell, perhaps best known as the smudge on the famous portrait he painted of his sisters where he removed his own image, popularly believed to be because he felt himself not worthy to be in the same picture as them.

Polly Teale's play, Brontë, doesn't aim to be another biography (in some ways it's as accurate as a Shakespeare history play) but explores the tensions between the siblings as they try to express their different forms of creativity.

How did the sisters manage to write and publish at all?

How did they survive life together with such different agendas? How did they deal with their repressed sexuality?

And how did they cope with both the fame and accusations of indecency?

Although Brontë is often thought of as a feminist play (I believe I am the first male to direct it) there is a lot of sympathy for Branwell, who is equally trapped by conventions.

Encouraged by their well-meaning father (who was remarkably enlightened in some ways) to be the "success" of the family, he soon realises the modest limits of his abilities and sinks into alcoholism, drug addiction and an early death.

Not a standard biography, more a series of scenes that highlight the ambitions and emotions of all the family.

It's full of physical action, some of it of a fairly adult nature, brought to life by a superb cast.

Above all, the play is an exploration of how we handle the tensions between our emotional life, our creativity and society's expectations – plus the odd moment of humour.

Read the original article here.