Brontë and new friends: Mohammad Ali and the Dalai Lama

News today. Rochester, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee. A theatrical review and Heathcliff reciting sutras.

It was something to be expected. After comparing Heathcliff with Conan... now Muhammad Ali is the new Rochester, according to Simon Barnes, Chief SportsWriter in The Times:

Muhammad Ali has become the Mr Rochester of sport. Mr Rochester is the hero of Jane Eyre: a male life-force, a figure of strength, an atavistic, thrilling, deeply dangerous man, passionate, impulsive, hugely alive, but with a secret sadness. He seeks to marry Jane: but the marriage can’t go through because he is already married: so he’s a sinner as well.

Then there is the great fire, and Mr Rochester is blinded in a failed attempt to save his mad wife from death. So Mr Rochester can at last marry his Jane: horribly diminished, enfeebled, helpless: more or less castrated. Only then is he free to be loved.

That’s why all the current hagiography of Muhammad Ali at 65 has made me sick. Ali is dearly beloved now all right: a man of peace, a healer of harms, the person who, by his single-handed brilliance, charm and saintliness, ended all the racial divisions in American society.

Such piffle. Ali was not a man of peace: he was a man of war. (...) He played his part: and was damaged irretrievably in the process. And now he is broken, destroyed, diminished, enfeebled, helpless and virtually castrated: so he is free to be loved, praised and hymned with loud hosannas. And it’s all humbug. Ali was a fighter. That was his point. As an athlete, as a figure in social history, he was the greatest fighter that sport has ever produced. That’s why he needs to be celebrated.

The Phoenix reviews the on going performances of Polly Teale's Brontë by the Wellesley Summer Theatre Company that we presented previously:
(Picture source)

Brontë jumps around in time to show the way in which the isolated children’s fantasy play(Charlotte and Branwell invented an imaginary world called Angria; Emily and Anne inhabited Gondal) and Branwell’s later alcoholism and sexual misconduct found their way into the inexperienced sisters’ novels. Characters from the books make appearances, with a fevered Catherine Linton and a sexually writhing Bertha Rochester getting the most stage time in their creators’ heads. Certainly the play is informative, though less compelling than Teale’s Jane Eyre, which draws connections between the heroine and the madwoman in the attic. And it is competently acted at Wellesley, though things do get over-rambunctious in the childhood scenes and in the later depiction of Branwell’s drunken mewling. WSTC stalwart Alicia Kahn is a Charlotte alternately controlling, seething, and repressed, but the most riveting figure is Catherine LeClair’s pinched and gangly, fiercely private Emily. If Charlotte’s creativity springs from ambition, Emily’s is rooted in a ferociously guarded imagination. It’s a wonder Bertha didn’t spring from her belfry. (Carolyn Clay)

On a different theatrical front, the new play, still a work in progress, of The Goat Island Company seems to have some Emily Brontë on it:

For all that, knowing that the latest work in progress has thus far been inspired by Emily Bronte, Nick Drake, Roberto Rossellini, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, Lenny Bruce and Bach is immaterial to appreciating the work. Goat Island trusts audience members to make their own associative leaps — that is, connect the dots. (Steffen Silvis in The Prague Post)

The Weirdo section of the day reserves another unlikely meeting: Heathcliff and the Dalai Lama.

Just as there is a never-ending literary debate on whether Heathcliff is a villain or a hero in the novel Wuthering Heights, we need to look at newly discovered information to take a position on King Lang Darma. (Bhuchung K. Tsering in Tibetan World Magazine)

Categories: In the News, References, Theatre, Weirdo