Underdog: The Other Brontë
‘What’s your favourite Brontë novel?’ demands Gemma Whelan’s bolshy Charlotte Brontë, as she accosts a succession of random audience members at the start of Sarah Gordon’s new play about the literary sisters. Although really, ‘Underdog’ is mostly a play about the troubled relationship between Charlotte and Anne: the eldest and youngest, most and least famous Brontës. Charlotte is of course forever remembered thanks to her great work ‘Jane Eyre’, while Anne remains the most obscure of the trio - in large part because Charlotte banned further publication of Anne’s hit ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ after her little sister died at 29. If it’s not a neat comparison, I’d say there are some parallels with Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus’, with Whelan’s Charlotte the domineering Salieri-style figure, weaving plots against Rhiannon Clements’s gifted but unworldly Anne. There’s a lot more swearing here, mind: Gordon’s dialogue is blunt, funny and wilfully anachronistic, the sisters goading each other in modern language, in Yorkshire accents so broad you could land a plane on them. Grace Smart’s set begins as a sumptuous, heather-strewn patch of moorland, but this is rapidly, ruthlessly pulled away – no romantic frills here. You are never far from a laugh, and the supremely watchable Whelan devours her part whole: she is wonderful as the wildly insecure but entirely fearless Charlotte, swaggering through the story with the elemental strut of a nineteenth-century Liam Gallagher, but beset by