The Day I Finished off Charlotte Bronte
by Charlotte Cory
(1 hr long radio play, broadcast BBC Radio 4, July 4 2002 (repeat December 26, 2002)
a "roller-coaster ride of the imagination" (the Stage)
review in :The Stage, 11.7.02
Charlotte Cory's roller-coaster ride of the imagination, The Day I finished
Off Charlotte Bronte (R4, Friday, July 5) was concerned with the archetypal
Victorian heroine, young Allaetitia, a 21st century girl who having been stuck
with a preposterous 19th century name, searches Bronte's works for a new meaning
to her life. A miserable life in an unorthodox (and very loud) family of three
girls and one boy (just like the Brontes). The downright eccentric parents were
passionate vegetarians but insisted the children ate port chops on Sundays to
inure themselves to meat in case the Queen ever invited them to lunch.
Natasha Barnes played Allaetitia with enormous charm and joie de vivre, and Patricia Hodge, as her older self narrating the story, grounded it in much-needed sobriety. Allaetitia dreamed of finishing Bronte's incomplete manuscript, "Emma", and on a visit to Haworth Parsonage, found herself both in the company of Bronte (Kathryn Hunt) and enmeshed as a character in the book.
Author Cory orchestrated the dizzying series of parallel existences with great skill. Just like the suppressed emotions of feminism one sees in Bronte's work, so this play was a cry to women across the generations - Allaetitia's 1960s mother (Janice McKenzie) while nominally more free than Bronte, was almost as restricted.
Moira Petty
The Stage
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