Less surprising, but equally buoyant

We have a good and a bad review for Tamasha's Wuthering Heights. The good one (more or less) comes from The Guardian:
Picture: Davina Perera in Wuthering Heights at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Photograph: Tristram Kenton. Source.

This Wuthering Heights has something which never overburdened Emily Brontë: a sense of humour. At the same time, the melodrama of the moors - its wails, its glowers, its gnashings and thunderings - translates perfectly into Bollywood's eye-rolling, breast-heaving extravagance; Kristine Landon-Smith's production takes its cue from the 1939 movie with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and wind-whipped, nostril-quivering profiles.
The choreography is limited: the lovers spend an awful lot of time running from side to side of the stage to show their entrapped passion; the dialogue is occasionally slurred; the stage is sometimes - and this is India? - underpopulated; the prevailing mood is alluring rather than alarming. But Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee's music expands the emotional vocabulary, with its big strings, its drummings and its sidling rhythms. A patina of irony is added by everyone lipsynching, Bollywood-style. Pushpinder Chani and Youkti Patel shimmer as the lovers. It's 13 years since Tamasha produced East is East; 11 years since they helped to propel Parminder Nagra towards stardom with Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings And A Funeral. Wuthering Heights is less surprising, but equally buoyant. (Susannah Clapp)

The bad one comes from The Independent:

From this silly romp we bound away to the tempestuous romance of Wuthering Heights, turned into a Bolly- wood-tinged musical by the British-Asian troupe, Tamasha.
It must be said, Kristine Landon-Smith's touring production has its risibly cheesy moments as Heathcliff and Cathy – renamed Krishan and Shakuntala – lipsynch to pre-recorded songs. Burning ardour loses all conviction when your hero and heroine are visibly just mouthing along. And there is more unwitting bathos in Felix Cross's lyrics. "She walks across the sand, like she's floating on air," croons the smitten Vijay – Krishan's wealthy rival – even as Youkti Patel's Shakuntala hobbles out of a wheelchair, recovering from a gunshot wound to the calf. I know love is blind, but this is ridiculous.
That said, adaptor Deepak Verma's concept, translating Emily Brontë's 1840s tale from the Yorkshire moors to the desert landscape of Rajasthan, is seductive. The ensemble spin in beautiful scarlet turbans and green saris on the zigzagging slopes of a golden dune (design by Sue Mayes). The Indian setting, moreover, enriches the tragedy, as the caste system proves a devastating barrier between the ragged Krishan and his socially superior childhood sweetheart.
A couple of the songs, jointly composed by Cross, Sheema Mukherjee and Chandru of Bollywood Strings, prove haunting, too, with echoing ululations, a husky bamboo flute and pulsing tablas. (Kate Bassett)

The Independent talks about Jean Rhys now that Lilian Pizzichini's biography of her, The Blue Hour, is going to be published:

She carried on, in a third unhappy marriage and drinking ever more heavily, until 1949, when a writer and actress called Selma Vaz Dias placed an ad in a newspaper looking for her. She wanted to adapt some of Rhys's work for the BBC; an editor, Francis Wyndham, wanted more work from Rhys. She had, she told him, a novel under way. It was Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of Bertha Mason, the first wife of Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
It's perhaps not surprising that Rhys's greatest work was about a woman who is rejected by the man she loves and goes on to destroy herself. Rhys constantly felt abandoned, yet was constantly searching for the man who could take care of her and, finally, make it all right. Yet, as Pizzichini rightly says, her writing was her true partner. It is possible that Rhys never fully realised this, or didn't want to realise it, perhaps: the path of the artist is often by necessity a lonely one, and Rhys drank not to feel lonely.
And so, her response to the sudden fame and fortune that Wide Sargasso Sea brought was classically self-pitying and the lament of the ingénue: "It has come too late." Rhys, ever the contradiction, wouldn't let it happen for her, however much she wanted it to. The truth of Jean Rhys's genius is contained within that contradiction, however: the little girl who wouldn't grow up, yet whose work depended, ultimately, upon the maturity of experience. I believe that she understood that contradiction. She knew what lay "deep and primitive" in her own soul. In her writing she was able to use it, and it was a relationship with a male writer that taught her how. (Lesley McDowell)

And yet another article from The Independent. Talking about the Poet Laureates, a mention is made to Robert Southey and his infamous 'advice' to Charlotte Brontë:

The first Poet Laureate to receive a salary was Henry James Pye (1790), who was given £27 a year and was not widely held to deserve it. The post in relation to women was defined by Robert Southey (1813), who in 1837 received a letter from Charlotte Brontë, asking for his advice about her poetry. He replied, discouraging her from writing anything further and advising her that "literature cannot be the business of a woman's life". (Katy Guest)

Finally, students who love Jane Eyre in Neighborhood Star, plays on words with Wuthering Heights in The Independent (Ireland) and Wuthering Heights evocations in Alaska in the Sunday Herald.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Music, References, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights