Brontë

'How did it happen?', Polly Teale's play about the Brontës asks. 'How was it possible?' Over two-and-a-half hours, Shared Experience's expressionist biodrama of Yorkshire's very own Three Sisters sounds out those questions. The result is always engaging, and performed with passion and pugnacity in Nancy Meckler's staging. But what made Charlotte, Anne and Emily writers remains a mystery, not least to themselves.That's not to doubt Teale's claim that the Victorian era's repression of women fuelled the sisters' creativity. They found in writing what they were denied in life. Teale revives a device first seen in her own 'Jane Eyre' 15 years ago, whereby the turbulent inner life of buttoned-down Charlotte (Kristin Atherton) is incarnated by the flamboyant 'madwoman in the attic' from her debut novel. But its search for the particular source of the sisters' art is doomed to be reductive at best, fruitless at worst. It's stronger when addressing the trio not as geniuses, but as people leading compromised, troubled lives.