HAIR salons have been transformed into mini theatres to tell a modern day version of the Bronte sisters’ rise to fame.
Jane Hair tells the story of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, re-positioning them as Bradford hairdressers who are struggling to get their writing out to a wider audience.
Today the performance will come to the birthplace of the Brontes, Thornton, where Jane Hair will be held at De Luca Hair Boutique in a sold-out show.
It has already been performed in the teaching salon at Keighley College, and on Friday there were two performances at the salon in Bradford College’s David Hockney Building, with the audience sitting in salon chairs and some invited up to have their hair styled by the sisters.
The play has been created by actor Kat Rose Martin, from Bierley, who also plays Emily, and writer Kirsty Smith, who grew up in Haworth and now lives in Ilkley, as a way of bringing the work of the sisters to the attention of more young people.
The title was inspired by the name of a hair salon in Crossflatts.
Jane Hair transforms Emily into a poet who posts her “poetry slams” online, Charlotte into a playwright and “the other one”, Anne, into a blogger. They work in the salon with their brother Branwell, a frustrated painter and gambling addict, but dream of making a living from their writing.
Miss Smith said previous events she had been to that discussed the Brontes had been fairly dry, and this was an effort to make the family more relevant to modern, and younger, audiences. She said: “The idea is to get more younger people involved in the Brontes’ work.
“I thought there wasn’t a great deal of ownership of them locally. People all over the world have this ownership of them, but we wanted more people in Bradford to know more about the amazing story of these sisters who achieved something absolutely massive.”
Miss Rose Martin said: “I wasn’t taught about the Brontes in school and I live in Bradford. How do we not know about the story of how these women got such amazing success? We thought ‘let’s make something relatable’ and not just look at them as people from a stuffy old picture from 200 years ago.
“We’re trying to show them as real people and accept them with all their human flaws.
“We hope this play brings out people who might not have been to the theatre before.”
They said working in the salon acted as a stand-in for the sisters’ home lives and their jobs – although famous as writers, they also had to work hard to make a living.
The play has been partly funded by the Bronte Parsonage, and the group hopes to bring the show to Haworth and other venues in the near future.
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