Writer Blake Morrison spoke to the thriving Brussels Brontë Group recently. Helen McEwan sent us this report, which also appears on our sister blog - the Brussels Brontë Blog.
Blake Morrison
began his talk by drawing out parallels between his own childhood and the
Brontës’. He told us about growing up near Skipton close to the Yorkshire-Lancashire
border, in an old rectory at the top of the village, not far from Pendle Hill
where the ‘Pendle Witches’ famous in local legend were hanged in 1612. His
mother was Irish and his father, as a doctor (in fact both parents were
doctors) was an important man in the village just as Patrick Brontë the parson
was in Haworth. He told us about reading Jane
Eyre in secret as a teenager – in secret because it was not considered
boys’ reading in the laddish Yorkshire culture of the time; it was not on the
curriculum at the boys’ grammar school he attended – and about the affinity he
felt with the young Jane and the novel’s power as a book for young adults.
Blake told us how he found out that his mother was hiding her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her bedside
table around the same time that he was hiding his of Jane Eyre (a novel that when it first came out was also regarded as
a ‘naughty’ book!).
Blake went on to
tell us how he came to write his play about the Brontës, We are three sisters. First he recounted how an earlier
Brontë-inspired stage production, a musical version of Wuthering Heights he wrote in 1986, was never performed; four other
musical versions of the novel were doing the rounds at the time and in the end Heathcliff with lyrics by Tim Rice,
starring Cliff Richard, was the only one to be staged. To give us a taste of his
own version of Wuthering Heights, Blake
read us the ballad Isabella’s Song,
which starts:
As I stepped out one
summer night
to feed my white ring-dove
a shadow fell across the gate
and swore undying love.
to feed my white ring-dove
a shadow fell across the gate
and swore undying love.
The shadow stretched
out tall and slim,
its face was black as night.
It spoke to me of wedding-rings
and bridesmaids bathed in light ….
its face was black as night.
It spoke to me of wedding-rings
and bridesmaids bathed in light ….
The full poem
can be read in his book of verse A discoverie
of Witches (2012) prompted by the Pennine landscape in which he grew up. In
a very different mood, the collection also includes the Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, an exploration - in dialect - of
the deeds and motives of Peter Sutcliffe, convicted of killing 13 women in
1981. Morrison has never shrunk from tackling such subjects, and has written a
book on the James Bulger murder case.
Turning to the
genesis of his play We Are Three Sisters,
in which he took up the challenge of re-writing Chekhov’s play with Charlotte,
Emily and Anne as the sisters, Blake told us that when a theatre critic friend first
suggested the idea to him, he dismissed it as ‘bonkers’. He was however
persuaded to go ahead with the project by the artistic director of the theatre
company Northern Broadsides, which staged the play in 2011.
 |
| Sophia di Martino, Catherine Kinsella and Rebecca Hutchinson as the Brontës in Northern Broadsides' production of Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters. Photograph: Nobby Clark |
In Blake’s play, Moscow, to which Chekhov’s three sisters long to go, has become London, and, similarly, various characters in the Chekhov play are replaced by equivalent characters from the Brontës’ circle (their doctor, Patrick’s curate). Blake explained that although he used the Brontës own words in his text where possible, the use of Chekhov’s play as a basis meant he had to take some liberties with the Brontës’ life story, with sometimes amusing results. For example, in his play the woman with whom Branwell is believed to have had an affair, his employer’s wife Lydia Robinson, turns up at the Parsonage, which she never visited in real life. Members of our group read out extracts from two scenes in the play: Charlotte and Anne telling Emily about their trip to reveal their identity to the publisher George Smith in London, and Charlotte telling her father about the publication of Jane Eyre.
Contrary to the
common perception of the Brontës’ lives as eventless, Blake found them full of
interest and drama and wanted to show Haworth as less bleak than it is
generally portrayed. His play has many touches of humour and he describes it as
a ‘tragi-comedy’, much like the original Chekhov.
