'Watch Her Now' An Evening with Charlotte Brontë
A one-woman play
performed by Lancaster-based actress
Prudence Edwards

Friday 1 December 2006,
DT3, The Dukes Youth Arts Centre, Moor Lane, Lancaster
Friday December 15,
St Peter's Church Hall, Main St , Heysham

Prudence Edwards’ one-woman show Watch Her Now - An Evening with Charlotte Brontë is primarily a play for Brontë aficionados. Unless you know not only that Charlotte Brontë was the author of Jane Eyre, but also wrote poetry and juvenilia, was herself a governess, was a prolific letter-writer, and had a sister called Anne (who also died young), you are going to find yourself wondering what’s going on and why you’re not sitting comfortably at home on a wet December night.

But Prudence Edwards has gambled successfully on the fact that there are Brontë aficionados in Lancaster – people who have probably made the journey across the Pennines to visit Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage more than once, and know that Charlotte and Emily went to school in Cowan Bridge near Kirkby Lonsdale, and that their older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died there. These are people who recognise and savour the well-known passages from Jane Eyre, and are more than willing to be educated with extracts from less familiar texts.

The play skilfully interweaves chronological passages from Jane Eyre with related letters (to Charlotte’s publisher; the Editor of the Edinburgh Review; her friend Ellen), Charlotte’s own poetry, and a story she wrote in self-conscious prose at the age of 13. This interweaving does work – not least because of the obvious similarities between the real life Charlotte and the fictional Jane. Both grew up motherless, had been reluctant teachers and governesses, had loved passionately, and both were not only intellectual and creative but had a distinct sense of intellectual superiority. The same plain high-necked Edwardian frock does well for both.

Prudence Edwards’ juxtaposition of the real and the fictional character is to be commended as an ingenious way to help audiences appreciate how the second woman grew out of the first.

The selection of extracts is good, not only balancing the familiar with the less familiar, but also each seems trimmed to just the right length. I was a little disappointed though with the predictable last line of the show: ‘Reader, I married him’. In contrast, the extract when Jane meets Mr Rochester for the first time, after he falls from his horse in the mist, is abruptly but cleverly terminated after his assertion that ‘I have no broken bones – only a sprain’, subtly suggesting the understated passion in the novel that we all know is to come.

Prudence Edwards gives a sensitive interpretation of the intense and serious Charlotte and the even more intense and serious Jane. She sustains this throughout: her facial expression rightly varies but she is never once out of role here. She reads from the novel and recites passages almost unfalteringly. It’s fortunate that there’s another opportunity to catch this show: if you’re even just a bit of a Brontë fan rather than an aficionado, it’s a good way to spend a Friday evening.

© Jane Sunderland
5 December 2006

Also playing on 15 December 7:30 pm, at St Peter's Church Hall, Main St., Heysham. Tickets available on the door.
Price of admission: £6.50/ £6.00 concessions
Contact details: 0789 001 9935

LINKS

Brontë Parsonage Museum
http://www.bronte.org.uk/

Prudence Edwards recently played in Tin Can Lurky (Freerange Theatre Company)
http://www.freerangetheatre.co.uk/tincan.htm