Cats and Moors

The South-Town Star reviews the Remy Bumppo's performances of Polly Teale's Brontë in Chicago. The reviewer didn't enjoy the show:

How did women who lived sexless lives end up writing the steamy and passionate "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre"?
If one is expecting an answer from the American premiere of "Bronte," playing at Remy Bumppo Theatre in Chicago, one will be sorely disappointed.
Written by Polly Teale, this limp and lumbering work lacks dramatic insight into the lives of the spinster novelists who lived in the English moors in the 19th century.
The father (Patrick Clear) of the three Bronte sisters -Charlotte (Susan Shunk), Emily (Carrie A. Coon) and Anne (Rachel Sondag) - was born into an illiterate Irish family but became self-educated and went on to college.
Because he was transformed by literature, the Bronte patriarch encouraged his daughters to read in a time when women were far removed from such intellectual pursuits.
The sister's brother, Branwell (Gregory Anderson), became a gambler, an alcoholic and a drug addict. The Bronte women used him as a model for their fictional male characters.
Surely, an examination of such a family would make for intriguing drama. But it doesn't.
Teale's tedious script doesn't offer clear motivation for these people. Indeed, the father who pulled himself up from poverty and the brother who had the family's expectations pulling him down have interesting possibilities that are not realized.
As presented in this production, the Bronte women come across as so boring that it's impossible to believe they wrote the hot, best-selling novels of their time.
James Bohnen's direction isn't much of a help, either. His staging staggers from natural realism to dreamy symbolism that has the play lurching between "now" and "then" and some place in between.
Because the Brontes' lives were uneventful, Teale attempts to get beneath the surface of the women's dull everyday existence into their inner emotions.
Teale attempts this by dredging up ghostly incarnations of characters from "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre." The episodes in which Linda Gillum, who portrays these ghostly specters, swishes, swirls and falls into a faint come across as laughably amateurish.
Not only are the characters in this production lifeless and the isolated environment in which they lived poorly evoked, but the accents of the performers are all over the place. One actor speaks in an English accent, another seems to have a Scottish dialect, and still another leans to an Irish lilt.
The production pokes along at such a sluggish pace that paying attention to "Bronte" is a struggle. That's a shame because the Bronte sisters deserve better. (Betty Mohr)

Salon reviews the new novel of Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End and makes the following passing comment:

That equipoise is a function of the author's ear, and in her last book, the bestselling "The Jane Austen Book Club," the pitch rarely wavered, right up to and including the title, which managed in a single swipe to siphon off its target demographic. Presented with that book cover, pretty much every straight man in America executes a 180-degree pivot, scanning the horizon for Colin Harrison titles, while his bookish girlfriend -- the one with the Colin Firth screen saver and the cats named after the Brontë sisters and the serious stash of tea -- stays rooted in place, eyes shimmering. She's home. (Louis Bayard)

Via Trashionista we have noticed the recently published Freya North's top 10 romps and romances in The Guardian:

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Another classic - but where Moll Flanders is deliciously bawdy, Jane Eyre is devastatingly romantic. The passion comes from the love between Jane and Rochester, so pure yet so constantly thwarted - they literally go through fire for it. I read somewhere that you won't understand true love until you've read this book.

Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover comments Justine Picardie's Daphne. The book has re-awaken the Brontëite inside her:

With that one small caveat I can say that I found this book fascinating and intriguing and has, once more, sent me back to my book cases to look at all my Bronte biographies, pull out my old Bronte Society papers, and plan a visit to Haworth again and perhaps take the walk to Top Withens. This may have to wait until the autumn, best not to visit the Parsonage at the height of the tourist season, best to visit when the days are drawing in, the lamps are lit and the wind is 'wuthering' and just wallow in the atmosphere.
And apropos of nothing, when I first visited Haworth as a teenager I stayed at a bed and breakfast in the village and was told by the landlady that they had had 'one of them authors' staying the week before and I was having her room. As with all things serendipitous, it seemed the former lodger was Winifred Gerin, whose biography of Branwell threatened to be published before Daphne's. So there you go. Make of that what you will. (Elaine Simpson-Long)

And the Brontë epiphany continues...

Some brief items: Life is a Bookshelf is not thrilled with Wuthering Heights and The Other World makes some interesting comments about the novel. Mission Verdopolitian strikes again with this ineffable William Callous Wilson Commemorative Plate: “Please Sir, Can I Have Some Moors ?”.

And finally we mention a really unexpected "Jane Eyre sighting" by Sandy Lender (check her comment) on a Typepad Tutorial!

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Humour, Theatre, Wuthering Heights