Next month, actors and writers are due to congregate in Haworth to promote the autumn premiere of Blake Morrison’s new play about the Bronte sisters.

Juliet Barker, biographer of the extraordinary Bronte family, will be there, along with actors from Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company, as well as Blake, a writer of poetry and plays who specialises in giving the language of his theatrical works a Yorkshire twist.

Is that because he was born and raised in Skipton, or because of the connection with Barrie’s Halifax-based company since 1995, during which time they have performed six of his plays?

“I think it’s both. The connection began because I was born in Yorkshire and Barrie read The Ballad Of The Yorkshire Ripper. He thought if I could bring the idiom and dialect of that poem to a play, it would be interesting. The result was The Cracked Pot,” says Blake.

“I knew that ballads had been written about notorious criminals as well as battles. I thought if you took a rhyming form for a dark and difficult contemporary subject, it would be interesting to see what happened.

“It was an attempt to tell Peter Sutcliffe’s story by drawing on dialect, some of which I knew from childhood and some was drawn from a dictionary.”

Blake has based his plays on the works of others – Heinrich von Kleist, Sophocles and Goldoni, to name three of them. We Are Three Sisters, his latest, was influenced by Chekhov’s 1901 comic drama of provincial unease The Three Sisters.

“Chekhov had read about the Brontes shortly before writing The Three Sisters,” he adds. “The likeliest source was Mrs Gaskell’s 1857 biography of Charlotte Bronte, commissioned after her death by her father Patrick.”

“So there are good reasons for transplanting the play to Haworth and identifying Irene, Masha and Olga with Anne, Emily and Charlotte – they even have a troubled and self-destructive brother in common.

“Above all, I hope that, by taking a cue from Chekhov, the play will banish the gloom surrounding the Brontes and reveal the Northern humour and resilience they showed, despite the ever-present threat of death and disease.

“In other words, I’d like to honour the truth of the Brontes while showing Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell and Patrick as they’ve never been seen before.”

“If you read Charlotte’s letters, there is a real spirit and wit and humour about them that has never been brought out.

“The Brontes tend to be portrayed as poor, tragic victims – figures of gloom,” Blake adds, saying it was a matter of getting away from these stereotypes.

Arguably, people are drawn to the Brontes because they are tragic figures. Branwell, Emily and Anne all died of TB within the space of nine months, from September 1848 to May 1849. Charlotte died in March 1855. Patrick Bronte, old and blind, outlived his entire family.

More than 150 years after the deaths of the three Bronte sisters, filmed versions of their novels are still coming out. The latest US production of Charlotte’s debut novel Jane Eyre is scheduled for release in British cinemas on September 9. Three weeks later, Andrea Arnold’s version of Emily’s Wuthering Heights is due out.

“It’s going to be a real Bronte fest in September,” Blake says. If he’s lucky, his play, directed by Barrie Rutter, will benefit from any extra interest created by these films. At the moment he’s still writing the script.

“This is the fifth draft now. Costumes and stage designs are still unfolding – casting has been done, I think; but undoubtedly there will be re-writes until the last minute.

“There are 70 pages of text, so I don’t think it will be a long play; but we won’t know until it’s up and running,” he adds.

Part of the purpose of the half-day at Haworth on July 21 is a cast read-through before an invited audience at the Baptist Chapel. Afterwards, a social event with drinks and nibbles is planned for the Bronte Parsonage Museum.

Chekhov’s play is set in the provinces. The elder of the Russian writer’s three sisters, Olga, is forever pining to leave the suffocating boredom of the army outpost where the family lives and return to busy life of Moscow where she was born.

Blake’s play is set in Haworth in 1848, “in a gloomy parsonage where there are neither curtains nor comforts”. This is where his three sisters light up their self-contained world with laughter, dreams and ideas; and writing, always writing.

The Bronte sisters, of course, were born in Thornton and later migrated over the hills to not so far away Haworth. But London, insists Blake, was on the minds of at least two of them.

“Anne and Charlotte were interested in London. They were the two who made the trip to see the London publisher. Emily wouldn’t go because she wanted to stay at home.”

We Are Three Sisters opens at Halifax’s Viaduct Theatre on September 9, and then tours. The box office number is (01422) 255266.