Anne, Charlotte and Emily
Photo by Raph Nogal
Guild Festival Theatre 2026/Brontë, The World Without, written by Jordi Mand, directed by Helen Juvonen, Greek Theatre, Guild Inn Estate, closes Aug. 2.
The Guild Festival Theatre is advertising its season as Gothic Girl Summer, an apt description considering its two productions focus on the Brontë sisters and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
Opening the season is Toronto playwright Jordi Mand’s Brontë, The World Without.
Mand writes what might be called narrative plays. Her primary concern is telling an engrossing story rather than constructing works driven by overt themes or weighty ideas. In Brontë, The World Without, she combines that gift for storytelling with a wealth of biographical detail to create an absorbing portrait of the three Brontë sisters—Charlotte (Laura Del Papa), Emily (Hilary Scott) and Ann (Lara Lucia). Although their father, The Reverend Patrick Brontë and their brother Branwell remain unseen presences, and their influence is keenly felt throughout, the focus, however, remains firmly on the sisters themselves, resulting in a deeply engaging portrait of their lives.
The play unfolds in a series of short scenes, separated by the three actors singing hymns, and occasionally dancing (choreography by Leah Wilton), to mark the passage from one episode to the next. The effect is gentle and lyrical, lending the production an understated beauty.
Production designer Elisia Evans makes elegant use of the Guild Festival’s outdoor Greek Theatre. With only a few carefully placed pieces of furniture—a chair here, a cabinet there, a table elsewhere—she evokes the Brontë parsonage where the sisters live with their clergyman father.
The Brontë Sisters
The Greek Theatre
Photo by Raph Nogal
The opening establishes the family’s grinding poverty. The sisters painstakingly calculate what little food they can afford, crossing basic necessities such as bread and meat off their list because there is simply no money to pay for them. Anne has returned from her position as a governess, Branwell has also come home, and Charlotte has come back from Brussels. With no reliable source of income except their father’s pitiful one, the family finds itself in desperate financial circumstances, and it is from this point of hardship that Mand’s evocative portrait of the Brontës begins.
Mand is particularly adept at developing both the sisters as individuals and the complex relationships among them. As the play progresses, they search for ways to earn money on their own. Charlotte and Anne advertise for positions as governesses, all the while trying to stretch their father’s modest salary far enough to keep the household afloat.
In the process, each sister emerges as a distinct personality, and all credit to the three actors who live in these roles and director Helen Juvonen, the masterhand behind the characterizations.
Charlotte is unmistakably the driving force of the family, ruling the household with determination and an iron will. Anne is more rebellious, striving to establish an identity independent of her formidable elder sister, although she finds it difficult to escape Charlotte’s influence. Emily, meanwhile, is the most fragile and reclusive of the three. Each time she leaves home to take a position, she becomes ill and is forced to return. The outside world is simply not where she feels she belongs.
Anne, Emily and Charlotte
Photo by Raph Nogal
Emily’s fiercely private nature is beautifully illustrated when Charlotte proposes that the sisters publish the poems they have all been writing. To Emily, the idea is almost unbearable—an unacceptable invasion of her privacy. It takes considerable persuasion before she agrees, and only on the condition that they conceal their identities behind male pseudonyms. Adopting the shared surname Bell, they become Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, allowing their work to be judged without the prejudice faced by women writers of the period.
The audience never sees either the sisters’ father or their brother Branwell, yet their presence is constantly felt through Maddie Bautista’s evocative sound design. Footsteps crossing the floor, doors slamming, bells commanding and other carefully judged effects make the two men feel like fully realized characters, even though they never appear onstage.
The sisters’ reactions are important.
They feel a deep sense of responsibility to their father. Despite their desperate financial circumstances, the sisters patiently save what little money they can so that he can undergo an operation to preserve his failing eyesight, a process that takes them nearly a year. Their devotion to him underscores the family’s closeness despite the hardships they endure.
Emily, Charlotte and Anne
Photo by Raph Nogal
Branwell, by contrast, is a source of anguish. Drinking himself into an early grave after a disastrous affair with a married woman, he is the household’s tragic figure. Charlotte is openly condemnatory, barely able to tolerate him, convinced that he is destroying both himself and the family. Anne and Emily are considerably more sympathetic, recognizing the depth of his emotional suffering even as they watch his steady decline. The differing responses to Branwell reveal yet another facet of the sisters’ contrasting personalities and add emotional depth to Mand’s portrait of this remarkable family.
The sisters’ ambitions soon extend beyond poetry to novels, each of them secretly working on a manuscript in the hope of publication. In one of the play’s more amusing moments, they send the manuscripts to publishers in the very same envelopes they have been using all along, merely scratching out one publisher’s name before addressing the package to the next. The result is an unintentionally comic reminder that every publisher can see exactly who has already rejected their work.
At last, there is encouraging news. Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights are accepted for publication, while Charlotte’s The Professor is rejected. The irony is delicious. Charlotte, the sister who has driven and organized the family, is devastated to find herself the only one left behind, and Mand captures both her crushing disappointment and the complicated emotions that success can bring, even within the closest of families.
The story, of course, eventually rights itself. Charlotte goes on to write Jane Eyre, the novel that secures her literary reputation. Anne’s novels, after their initial success, gradually fall into relative obscurity, while Emily’s Wuthering Heights, savaged by many contemporary critics, ultimately comes to be recognized as one of the greatest novels in the English language.
Running alongside the sisters’ literary fortunes is the growing shadow of illness. One of them quietly observes that their family does not seem destined for long lives, and the prophecy proves heartbreakingly true. Emily dies first, followed by Anne, leaving Charlotte to face a future without the sisters who had defined her life.
The play is deeply moving as it traces the ebb and flow of the Brontës’ fortunes. Although the sisters quarrel, challenge, and occasionally wound one another, the abiding strength of their love ultimately transcends every disagreement. The image of Charlotte confronting a world without Emily and Anne gives the play its title and provides a hauntingly emotional conclusion.
Charlotte and Anne
Photo by Raph Nogal
Jordi Mand has created a powerful portrait of these extraordinary women, and director Juvonen, with the help of her actors, brings their story to the stage with sensitivity and emotional clarity. Alex Amini’s evocative early nineteenth-century costumes and Honey Hoseiny’s warm, atmospheric lighting complement Evans’s elegant design, while the Guild Festival’s Greek Theatre provides one of Toronto’s most beautiful outdoor performance spaces. Together, they create an ideal setting for this deeply affecting portrait of the Brontë sisters.
Special praise must be given to Jordi Mand’s meticulous research. What is so impressive about the play is that nothing feels either forced or gratuitous. Mand seamlessly blends documented fact with informed imagination, creating scenes that ring with complete emotional and historical authenticity.
Whether every exchange actually took place is beside the point. When the reviews of Wuthering Heights arrive and Charlotte tells Emily that she should not have made Heathcliff such a beast, only for Emily to insist that he had to be exactly as he was, the conversation feels utterly believable. One can easily imagine Charlotte offering practical advice about making the novel more palatable, while Emily remains steadfastly loyal to her uncompromising artistic vision. Whether those words were ever spoken is almost irrelevant; they are entirely true to the women Mand has so carefully created.
That is the play’s greatest achievement. The boundary between history and imagination all but disappears, leaving a portrait of the Brontë sisters that feels authentic in every respect.