Brontë Reviews and a Jane Eyre preview

And both of them from Polly Teale's plays.

MysticGypsy reviews Brontë's performances on Wellesley, Massachussets that we presented a few days ago (another review here). We recommend a careful reading of this excellent post. It's really worthwhile:

Besides focusing on the Brontës' lives as writers, its innovations in stage setting and characterization, its ability to provoke the minds of the viewers and challenge commonly held notions of the Brontes and the Victorians, Polly Teale's Brontë is a play that intrigues and captivates, adding new twists that will appeal to any one--whether you are a Brontë aficionado, or don't have the faintest idea of them beyond English class. (Read more) (MysticGypsy on Ramble in The Park)

More reviews from these performances can be found on this post from The Wellesley Report:

The first half of the play sets the scene and is slow. The second half picks up the pace, as confrontations come to a head between Branwell and his sisters and between the sisters themselves, though it slows down again toward the end. We weren't anticipating dancing girls, pyrotechnics or other such flashiness in a play on this topic, but this performance clocks in at about 2 and a half hours and does feel like it. (Read more)

The preview is from the other Polly Teale's play that is touring the US, Jane Eyre. As we informed previously The Acting Company now arrives in New York and The New York Journal News interviews some scholars trying to understand Jane Eyre's permanent appeal:

But why "Jane Eyre" and not kid sister Emily's "Wuthering Heights," arguably the more imaginative novel, or even baby sis Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," an unvarnished portrait of male-female relationships?
The answers lie in the kind of classic "Jane Eyre" is, experts say - a superbly written, hypnotically woven story by and about a woman that resonates in our post-feminist age.
"Jane is a different kind of character than the 19th-century reader was used to," says Sophia Soloway, a senior English major at Purchase College, who's incorporating "Jane Eyre" and Jean Rhys' sensual "prequel," "Wide Sargasso Sea," into her thesis on representations of women and madness.
"She speaks a lot for the individual and making a place on her own. She speaks to girls of her time and our time still."
This is never truer than in the moment when Jane confronts the teasing Rochester. (...)She reaches out to Rochester: "It is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet equal, - as we are!"
This is "the language of liberty," says Louise Yelin, the Kempner distinguished professor of literature at Purchase College. And liberty has its price.
"The cost is the madwoman in the attic," says Yelin. "She has to jump in order for Jane to get married."
The madwoman cackling in the attic is the Jamaica-born Bertha Antoinetta Mason, Rochester's first wife - whose vindictive, wrathful insanity he seeks to conceal with tragic results. Since the feminist movement of the 1970s, it's not unusual to see Bertha sympathetically portrayed as a vibrant beauty, married off to the fortune-hunting Rochester and doomed by the strictures of colonial patriarchy.
"As much as 'Jane Eyre' is a feminist fable, it's also a fable of imperialism, racism and slavery," Yellin says, "a story of how liberty in the West is dependent on enslavement elsewhere."
The notion of Bertha imprisoned by social madness is the premise of both Soloway's term paper - and one of its sources, "Wide Sargasso Sea" - and The Acting Company's production.
"Our adaptation frames the story as one woman's containment and release," says Davis McCallum, director of The Acting Company's presentation, in which Bertha gets almost as much stage time as Jane.
Adds Christopher Oden, the Ossining-reared actor who plays Rochester: "Our adapter (British writer Polly Teale) conceives of the first wife as an alter ego for Jane, representing all the sex and rage she has to push down in order to make her way in the world."
"There's a tension between the spiritual and the sensual, which are warring inside Jane," says Purchase College provost Elizabeth Langland, who wrote "Anne Brontë: The Other One" (Macmillan, 1989) and will introduce The Acting Company performance. "That's the classic divide, and how do you unify those?" (...)
"'Jane Eyre'," Langland says, "is a powerful story of women and men and finding balance in love and spirit."

Categories: Jane Eyre,Theatre