"A disappointingly un-Byronic piece of trouser"

April de Angelis's adaptation of Wuthering Heights in Birmingham continues generating reviews. According to the Daily Mail,

The Birmingham Rep has opened its big autumn show: a dramatisation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
If Girl With A Pearl Earring is not focused enough, the snag here is the opposite.
Wuthering Heights is such a big story, demanding storm-ravaged bleakness, that a stage feels too safe a place to show it.
Elegant Susannah York is the best thing in this, her voice carrying better than those of younger actors.
She plays Nelly, the old family retainer who narrates the terrible tale of the Lintons and the plainly loopy Heathcliff (did Gordon Brown really mean to compare himself to this nasty piece of work?).
Balding Antony Byrne may be an established actor, but looks-wise he is no Heathcliff. What a disappointingly un-Byronic piece of trouser he makes.
I quite enjoyed the first half, but after the interval the show descends into increasing silliness. Sickly young Linton, for instance, is almost as camp as Julian Clary.
Edmund Kingsley's Hindley, the great rival of Heathcliff, does so much inaudible shouting he could have been one of the megaphone-wielding bores outside the Conservative Party conference which was happening next door this week.
Verdict: No shortage of madness
** (Quentin Letts)

3 News posts information about Jane Eyre in Dunedin, including a video interview with Laura Hill, who plays Jane Eyre. The video also shows images from the play (Picture source).

The Independent reviews The Glass of Time, By Michael Cox, and makes this comment in passing:

The country house has long been the natural home of tales about mystery and mistaken identity. From the shadowy setting of The Turn of the Screw to the attics of Jane Eyre, the gloomy mansion of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith to the doomed grandeur of Kate Morton's The House at Riverton, a country residence is shorthand for a closeted world of secrets and lies. (Rebecca Armstrong)

On the blogosphere, Cormorant Books interviews author Kathlyn Bradshaw:

Were there any specific books or movies, besides Frankenstein, that inspired you while writing the novel?
KB: Anything written at or around the time that Mary Shelley was writing was definitely helpful, but any stories with a gothic and/or mysterious setting were also useful, for instance, classics such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Movie and television adaptations of stories such as these helped in two ways. First, they provided visual and aural inspiration, and second, they too were derived from someone else’s novel.

Past and Present Intertwined comments on Mark Ryan's Wuthering Heights-inspired songs. And Wuthering Expectations writes about 'the Brontë family creative writing workshop'.

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