As we walk into the theatre a woman sits on stage frantic­ally writ­ing in a tiny book. She wears a plain blue dress made out of dif­fer­ent pat­terned fab­rics. Her hair is par­ted in the middle and tightly pulled back. Every so often she pauses, looks into the dis­tance, then scribbles some more. The fur­niture is sparse – a writ­ing desk, a table, a chair. A fire­place is in the back­ground with books on shelves on either side. Four tiny paint­ings com­plete the pic­ture of a study belong­ing to a fam­ily of mod­est means. The woman is Char­lotte Bronte.

Over the next 75 minutes Char­lotte tells us the story of her life – her fam­ily, her sis­ters, her writ­ing, her ambi­tion.  At least 75% of the script comes from her let­ters and nov­els. This makes the frus­tra­tion and sor­row expressed all the more poignant.

Mel Dodge whirls around the stage through the pro­duc­tion. Almost con­stantly in motion it is a nice way of show­ing the char­ac­ter­’s desire for move­ment while dir­ectly relat­ing to the fact that Bronte and her sis­ters used to get so worked up dur­ing their writ­ing ses­sions that they would stride around the table. Dodge is par­tic­u­larly affect­ing dur­ing the scenes where she’s still, when she is play­ing grief and sad­ness. Her lower lip trembles, and tears well up in her eyes. I abso­lutely believe the truth of her per­form­ance in those moments. I want to have more time to be affected by it.

A strong per­form­ance based on a strong script.