Auditions are coming up for Stagecraft’s second play of 2018. Brontë will be a New Zealand premiere. Performances will also be part of Stagecraft’s 60th anniversary celebrations.
This is the New Zealand premiere of Polly Teale’s masterpiece, Brontë. It’s about the three Brontë sisters, who lived single and isolated lives on the Yorkshire moors, yet wrote some of the most powerful fiction ever penned. This play digs into the Brontë family dynamic and explores how the seemingly mundane, isolated and oppressed outward lives of these spinsters was a poor façade for the passionate and brilliant women underneath.
Set predominantly in 1845 (it jumps around a bit), Charlotte Brontë is just about to write Jane Eyre and Emily is writing Wuthering Heights. During this time, women couldn’t publish under their own gender or even enter a library – they had a very limited part in public life. This play combines the real and the imaginary, as the Brontës' fictional characters haunt their creators.
This production will be a beautiful voyage into the lives of English literature’s early feminists.
Ages are ‘stage ages’ and there’s wiggle room.
Accents: be prepared to audition with an English accent (RP). The actor playing Patrick needs to be able to do an Irish accent. Yorkshire accents would be ideal and will be requested at the audition, but it’s an ‘everyone does one no one does one’ thing.