"Wuthering Heights is Bollywood"

Metro (London edition) has a warming-up article on Tamasha's Wuthering Heights, which will arrive at the Lyric Hammersmith on April 29 and will stay there until May 23.

The first thing people ask Deepak Verma about his Bollywood adaptation of Wuthering Heights is whether it features the Kate Bush song. 'Then they tell me they love Bollywood dancing,' he grins. 'To me, the novel naturally fits the genre; it's not about shoehorning it in. Wuthering Heights is Bollywood.'
Emily Brontë purists may be snorting into their Earl Grey at the idea of transposing Cathy and Heathcliff's turbulent love affair from the freezing Yorkshire moors to the gleaming Rajasthani deserts. But Verma – recognisable to many from his former role as market trader Sanjay in EastEnders – holds no truck with preserving precious cultural distinctions.
Since leaving Albert Square, he's reinvented himself as a film producer and writer and feels totally at ease mashing up Western and Asian culture; perhaps a reflection of feeling caught between England and his parents' native Punjab.
'I've got a lot of stories I want to tell that connect with my background but I also want to tell ones that will connect with everyone else,' he says, low-slung Essex vowels to the fore. 'Everyone knows Wuthering Heights: it's like Coca-Cola. And Bollywood isn't just a fad any more: it's part of the fabric.'
The last notable artist to adapt Brontë's only novel for the stage was Cliff Richard; his 1996 musical, Heathcliff, was largely considered abysmal. This time, it's been produced by respected Asian theatre company Tamasha, still best known for the original stage production of Ayub Khan-Din's East Is East.
Verma has high hopes for this version, pointing out the natural parallels between the unforgiving Rajasthan deserts and the Yorkshire moors, the Indian caste system and the Victorian English class system, and emphasising the universal appeal of an epic narrative of thwarted love featuring a gipsy child brought up by foster parents.
'Heathcliff's story is very Indian,' he points out. 'The heightened emotions of Brontë's novel; its dreamlike quality and escapism. It's pure Bollywood.' Verma came to England with his parents in the 1970s and grew up on Bollywood films.
'We used to go to the Regal cinema in Hackney [now an Iceland] where they would show Indian films in the afternoons. Indian audiences are totally different to English ones: they get involved. Kids throw popcorn, samosas… 'When we showed Wuthering Heights in Oldham, the Indian kids gasped out loud when Heathcliff kisses Cathy. Although that might be because Bollywood films don't show people kissing. We've overturned that convention. But we've kept other Bollywood ones: the dancing and songs [one is a loving tribute to Ascot Gavotte from My Fair Lady but with camels instead of horses]. And the actors will lip-sync to playbacks.'
Thanks partly to his background, Verma has always had an affinity with Heathcliff. Just as Cathy does in the book, he even declares he is Heathcliff. (He certainly looks more like him than Cliff.)
'Heathcliff is an outsider; he's got to work ten times harder than anyone else to get to the same point, he's single-minded and determined,' he says. 'Which is me in a way. I was always the kid in goal at school because no one wanted me on their team; I used to get beaten up and called Paki. Heathcliff is an amazing anti-hero – there's a bit of him in all of us.'
Does he worry that giving Wuthering Heights an Indian context might risk the latter feeling like a gratuitous exotic backdrop?
Verma scoffs. 'There might be that risk but I'm not interested in doing something just because it's Asian. I'm doing it because the two work together. Basically, I want it to be theatre's version of Slumdog Millionaire.' (Claire Allfree)

On the other side of the Atlantic, Edge Boston mourns the death of Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, author of the notorious essay on Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.

She went much further than the groundbreaking feminist study of English literature, "The Madwoman in the Attic," which was slightly dismissive of Austen compared to authors like the Brontes and George Elliot. (Steve Weinstein)

Lancaster Online talks to writer Libby Malin Sternberg, whom we already know to be a big fan of Jane Eyre.

As a teen, Sternberg loved the Trixie Belden series.
"They (along with 'Jane Eyre') really turned me on to reading ... for pleasure and not just for class," says Sternberg. (Mary Beth Schweigert)

Stephanie Harper has compiled a list of her '10 favourite tragic literary figures' for the Denver Examiner. Take a look at number 6:

6. Antoinette Cosway- I have a special place in my heart for literature based on other literature, and this 1966 postcolonial triumph, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, that takes the psychopathic first wife of Jane Eyre’s Rochester, and turns her into a tragic Creole heiress confined by the patriarchal society of the British Caribbean, and the marriage to the sadistic young Rochester, is a true masterpiece. Her native beauty, and the poetry of her world view is so incredibly written that when she at last succumbs to the inevitable madness that Rochester pushes her into, I weep for the loss of a beautiful soul.

Incidentally, a good many sites and blogs have reminders of Charlotte Brontë's birthday today. Worthwhile Books celebrates it with a quotation from Jane Eyre.

Finally, Brontës.nl (the original is in Dutch, so here's the English translation courtesy of Google) has posted an account along with several pictures of last Sunday's Anois concert where they presented their new album Emily Brontë.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, Music, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights