STC gives us a compelling Bronte adaptation for our moment

Actor Remy Hii in Sydney Theatre Company's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , 2022. Photo: Sydney Theatre Company/Prudence Upton - Professor Vanessa Smith, an expert in 19th century literature, examines a stage adaptation of Anne Bronte's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - a story of addiction, domestic abuse, child custody disputes and female artistic self-reclamation. "You know when it's the autumn of 1827, and you're sitting in a church, having the wrong sort of existential crisis?" Gilbert Markham (Remy Hii) asks the audience at the beginning of Emme Hoy's compelling theatrical adaptation of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). He is reminding us we are in a period drama - something easy to forget with this very modern-feeling tale of addiction, domestic abuse, child custody battles and female artistic self-reclamation. Brontë's novel marked the death throes of the Regency marriage plot, skewering those Byronic heroes (think Jane Eyre's Rochester) beloved of Anne's older sisters Charlotte and Emily Brontë. At its centre is a disastrous union between a budding artist, Helen Lawrence (Tuuli Narkle) and a villainous, oddly infantile rake, Arthur Huntingdon (Ben O'Toole). The novel's grim account of alcoholic domestic entrapment did not impress early reviewers, who condemned it as "coarse", "disgusting", "brutal" and "revolting".