The very mention of the English moors is enough to send a shudder up many spines – think the 1960s Moors Murders, the Hound of the Baskervilles and even Cathy and Heathcliff romping around the hills.

The next play coming up at the Mill Theatre in Fyshwick, The Moors, by American playwright Jen Silverman, was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s real letters yet it is, as one of the lead players in the show tells us, “so much fun”.

Briefly, a young governess, Emilie, arrives at a remote manor after exchanging correspondence with a Mr Branwell. But when she arrives, she meets only Branwell’s two creepy sisters, a maid (or maybe two maids) and a mournful mastiff, but no man or child.

Andrea Close, who plays one of the isolated Brontë-like sisters, has no hesitation in describing the play as “laugh-out-loud funny,” but assures me that it will also be popular with people who are mad literary fans of the three Brontë sisters. 

“The play is also a bit of a mystery with a sense of humour that is quite twisted,” she says.

It’s been cast with fairly mature actors, but then again it’s all relative, and in real life Anne died at 29, Emily at 30 and Charlotte at 38.

“It’s a really beautiful ensemble piece where we all have delicious roles,” Close says.

The plum roles – unless you count the dog (Chris Zuber) and the moorhen (Petronella van Tienen), who are bound to steal the show – are the two sisters, Agatha (Close) and Huldey (Rachel Howard), the governess (Sarah Nathan Truesdale) and, of course, the upstairs-downstairs stage maid/s played by Stef Roberts, who played the hilarious maid in the Rep’s Bloody Murder last year. 

Close tells me you can’t exactly match the sisters to the Brontë sisters – but they do have an offstage brother whose name, as with the real-life Brontës, is Branwell.

“I play Agatha, she’s the elder of the two and runs the household with an iron hand, seeing my younger sister as a flippity gibbet,” but one who brings comedy, she adds.

She is not about to commit any spoilers, but hints that when the governess comes into the house, all the repressed pain and secrets come out.

“It’s a rather repressed world,” she says, “but with a wonderful creepy underground… dark and mysterious, fun and kooky.”

In part it deals with sibling rivalry in the relationship between the two sisters, but it’s a very different show from Baby Jane, recently staged by Rep.

Directed by Joel Horwood, it features period costuming by Sydney-based Aloma Barnes, who has been travelling to and from Canberra, sourcing costumes in Sydney and making a few special ones for the show.

And yet, playwright Silverman has asserted: “I would never call it a ‘genre piece’ or a ‘period piece’… These characters are reaching moments in their lives where they’re saying: I must change, how do I do it? Can I do it?”

Close says the 85-minute play, to run with no interval, is almost impossible to preview because “it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen before”.

What makes it so hilarious, she believes, is the very dark humour intertwined with a contemporary viewpoint in a lot of passages so that even Brontë-lovers will get a kick out of it. 

“Wuthering Heights is, personally, my favourite book,” Close says. 

“So I get a certain relish doing this play… the humour comes from the surprises… the audience will not know what’s happening and that’s a lovely thing for the theatre – but you’ll have to see it to believe it.”

The Moors, Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, March 26-April 12.