Charades in Rajasthan

The Telegraph (Calcutta) publishes details about the next production of Tamasha Theatre Company which revamps Wuthering Heights as a Bollywood musical: (Picture: Sudha Bhuchar (left) with Rajneet Sidhu. Source)

“Our next production will be Wuthering Heights,” I am told by Sudha Bhuchar, artistic co-director of the Tamasha Theatre Company.
She adds: “It will be a Bollywood musical.”
By that she means it will be a song and dance affair but in English for a British audience. Perhaps the spirit of Emily Brontë should not be too perturbed at this Indianisation of her 1847 novel, but Tamasha is transposing her classic to somewhere not a million miles from the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur.
Instead of Heathcliff searching the windswept moors of Yorkshire for his Cathy, “the scorched desert landscape of Rajasthan is the setting for this musical interpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic tale of passion, jealousy and revenge. Shakuntala, headstrong daughter of spice merchant Singh, falls for Krishan, a street urchin that Singh brings home after one of his trips to the market.”
The big question is: “Can their adolescent love withstand India’s rigid social hierarchies?”
Tamasha is at its best when doing popular stuff but 10 years have passed since it did the hugely enjoyable Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral, based on the Bollywood blockbuster, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. Andrew Lloyd Webber came to see the musical, left at the interval and then did his own thing — Bombay Dreams — with music by A.R. Rahman.
Tamasha has been good at nurturing young talent. So this is a time of hope for Rajneet Sidhu, a 27-year-old actress who is bidding to play Shakuntala in Wuthering Heights and who is part of the new generation of British-born Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who have all been bitten by the acting bug.
She has just played the central role of Tazeen, a runaway Pakistani teenager in Sweet Cider, Tamasha’s current offering which presents an exceedingly bleak picture of young Muslims in a northern English town.
“I have read Wuthering Heights a long time ago,” Rajneet tells me, after the last night of Sweet Cider in London last week.
The Brits don’t go in for lip synch — the lucky ones picked for Wuthering Heights will have to act, sing and dance.
“We are starting to cast,” reveals Sudha. (Amit Roy)

The Guardian explains the origins of playing charades and how to play them. A mention to the ones in Thornfield Hall is mandatory:

Charades originated in 16th-century France where parlour games were the popular way to spice up an evening. In Britain, the game was embraced by the Victorians and the Edwardians, and became a fashionable source of after dinner entertainment.
Charlotte Brontë uses a game involving Mr Rochester and Miss Ingram as a narrative device in Jane Eyre. (Carlene Thomas-Bailey)

The Daily Star (Malaysia) reviews John Mullan's Anonymity and quotes several Charlotte Brontë/Currer Bell anecdotes:

And it seems Charlotte Brontë was also reluctant to admit that she was Currer Bell, author of Jane Eyre. She was so determined to maintain her anonymity that when, at a dinner party, the novelist W.M. Thackeray addressed her as “Currer Bell”, Brontë said she knew there were books by that person but that she was “Miss Brontë”, and that she saw no connection between the two. And yet, it must have been clear to Brontë that she had been invited to Thackeray’s party only because she was the author of a famous book. Perhaps, while she desired public recognition and the rewards that came with it – such as being invited into literary society – she was also leery of how the knowledge of her sex would affect public opinion of her novels.
At that point in time (Jane Eyre was published in 1847) in Britain, it was still not considered wholly respectable for a woman to write books unless they were edifying and moralistic texts. George Henry Lewes, on realising that Currer Bell was a woman, commented in his review of Brontë’s Shirley, on the book’s “over-masculine vigour”, which “often amounts to coarseness”, and accused Brontë of attempting to “escape her femininity”. No wonder the poor woman wished that Currer Bell should be the only name “mentioned in connection with my writings”. (Daphne Lee)

And now a Jane Eyre-meets-something/someone sighting. The Independent reviews Michael Faber's The Fire Gospel:

Faber's signature preoccupation with extreme grottiness, established in The Crimson Petal and the White (think Jane Eyre rewritten by William Vollmann) remains intact: The Fire Gospel's brief duration is fit to burst with seedy dwellings, open wounds and post-coital slumps. (Ed Lake)

The Portuguese Jornal de Notícias discovers another Brontëite, author António Lobo Antunes:

O homem para quem o "Monte dos Vendavais" de Emily Brontë, é o livro, um daqueles que retrata o silêncio e provoca um ruído inquietante e insónias, as características que mais aprecia e o desafiam numa obra, disse que aos 13 anos tinha sonhos de glória. (Lucínia Girão) (Google translation)

The German magazine Cicero interviews author Donna Leon who, we are afraid, will never join our ranks:

"Ich hasse Jane Eyre. So eine schleimige Gestalt!“ Als sei das keine Romanfigur, sondern eine höchst aufdringliche Bekannte. (Carla Woter) (Google translation)

Finally, Eclipse Magazine publishes a brief review of the Studio One Anthology DVD release which includes Wuthering Heights 1950, Gondal-girl talks about Justine Picardie's Daphne:

Daphne is an mysterious story wrapped up in another mysterious story. Sometimes I am not sure what is fact and what is writerly invention, which is at times clever and sometimes frustrating, for I want to get to that kernal of the truth. Sometimes as I read, I wonder would this story have been better told as a kind of biography - for Justine looks at her modern character who looks at Daphne who looks at Branwell, and I feel I am trapped in a hall of mirrors - where writers are being haunted by their characters and the mystery deepens.

and Frames/sing publishes a scholar article entitled Piranesi and Bronte: Gothic Constructed Haunting, a move toward eternity:

This is a pragmatic study of the narrative strategies employed by Emily Brontë in her opening scenes of Wuthering Heights. I say pragmatic because it seeks to examine the constitutive effects brought about through her treatment of two classes of figurative language, those of “space” and those of “sound”, with the aim of showing how Brontë in the her initial three chapters constructed a signifying machine, that is, a juxtaposition of readerly effects, such that allowed her to present an unpresentable: a space that speaks. (kvond) (Read more)

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Scholar, Theatre, Wuthering Heights