We Are Bronte
Carriageworks Theatre
Leeds/Touring

IT’S a common misconception that Kate Bush wrote Wuthering Heights, notes Sarah Corbett. To compensate for anyone who’s disappointed that Publick Transport’s latest production is instead about the Bronte sisters myth, she performs an interpretative dance while Angus Barr sings the track a capella.

This is one of the more straightforward scenes in We Are Bronte, which giddily deconstructs the real and imaginary worlds of the literary siblings. Dressed in tattered Victorian costume, Corbett and Barr play an amalgam of characters who variously endure “wuthering” weather, have the “pistons of their heart turned” as they move like robots from some Orwellian 1984 and repeatedly die of TB while coughing up red feathers.

The novel or situation referenced isn’t always easy to identify, but the obfuscation is all part of the fun. Deadpan throughout, Barr acts as interpreter and editor (“that scene demonstrated the fact that they wrote books …”) while Corbett, silent for large sections of the production, relies on exaggerated facial expressions for laughs alongside a bad wig that makes her resemble the fifth member of the Pale Waves.

A couple of the episodic scenes fall flat, with Barr speaking for the entire audience when he declares “that’s enough of that” and kills a tape of gothic music to which the duo are jerkily shuffling.

Being a victim to their own irreverent whimsy is nonetheless a price worth paying because, when this duo's combination of physical theatre, deliberately wonky props and post-modernism work, then they’re fantastically funny.

Tours until October 12. Click here for more details.