Shock, horror, a few days ago there was a top-of-the-page story that Radio 3 is to broadcast a new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which both Cathy and Heathcliff will utter the f-word. Proof, if proof were needed, that the Brontës and their novels remain right at the forefront of public interest.

In Polly Teale’s play Brontë, drunken Branwell doesn’t actually mouth the f-word as he stumbles back into Haworth Parsonage, but nonetheless he has an explosive effect on his three sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne — not to mention on his deeply religious and conventional father, the Rev Patrick Brontë. Teale’s parsonage is a grey, dreary, place (atmospherically suggested by Ruth Sutcliffe’s set design), and the sisters live claustrophobic, repressed lives within its walls. Their escape is in their writing: “I write to leave behind my miserable body,” says Charlotte, “I write to be unknown, unknowing, to exist outside and beyond myself.”

Teale’s play is extraordinarily ambitious. It fuses grinding domestic routine (“Mother was not there to organize tea parties, or make us wear pretty frocks”) with each sister’s very different personality, and then adds characters from the novels themselves. First produced five years ago by Teale’s own Shared Experience theatre company, the play was reworked by Shared Experience co-director Nancy Meckler for the Watermill, Newbury, last year. It’s this new version that is being staged at the Oxcford Playhouse this week.

As scene follows scene in quick-fire succession, the character of each sister is built up. Domestic disputes are supplemented by sometimes barbed exchanges of literary opinion — spiced, in due course, by the arrival of publishers’ rejection letters. Charlotte (Kristin Atherton) comes over as the most antagonistic and dominant, yet sexually repressed, of the three, while Emily (Elizabeth Crarer) is much more wild — perhaps a little too much 21st-century rebelliousness jumps out here. Meanwhile the lesser-known Anne (Flora Nicholson) features as the great appeaser: she seems the nicest of the three. Circling round are the boorish Branwell (Mark Edel-Hunt), so out of control that at one point he makes a dive for Charlotte’s crotch (another 21st-century touch too far?), and wonderfully obsequious curate Bell Nicholls (Stephen Finegold), who appears to be directly modeled on Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice.

The overall result is a gripping, if stern, evening of theatre. Teale writes extremely well, as befits a play about such major literary figures. You can quarrel about some of the details, but you are left with an overwhelming impression of three truly extraordinary women.

Until Saturday. Tickets: 01865 305305 or online (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).