In this play, young Branwell Bronte, who once ruled an imaginary world, is now a man, grown mad trying to cope with the real one. Having failed as a poet and painter, as doomed in love as he is in literature, he slips ever more quickly down the road of drink, drugs and despair. His loving father Patrick and talented sister Charlotte fight a last-ditch stand for his salvation, but it is Branwell's sinister friend, gravedigger John Brown, who threatens to have the last word in this ultimately terrifying take on the brilliant family we have read so much about and all thought we knew so well.