More Tamasha: Reviewing the reviews edition

Our usual beginning of late: more reviews of Tamasha's Wuthering Heights. The Guardian reviews both the play and other reviews with which you will be familar as we have been posting them:
Picture: Youkit Patel as Shakuntala and Pushpinder Chani as Krishnan. Photograph: Tristram Kenton (Source)

When you first heard that Emily Brontë's brooding Victorian love story was going to be staged as a Bollywood musical by Sanjay off of EastEnders, naturally your hopes were high. No matter that the novel, according to the Guardian's Michael Billington, has already been the source for "23 plays, 14 musicals, 16 TV and radio adaptations and eight films". And never mind that Deepak Verma has decided to cut the vengeful second half of the book, thereby bringing his version "closer to Mills and Boon than King Lear" (Billington).
What clearly transcended these quibbles was that, as the Times's Clive Davis puts it, "Brontë's taste for the Gothic and Mumbai's love of melodrama ought to have made a promising match". And after all, everybody loves a bit of Bolly, don't they? What's not to like about an incredibly long and incomprehensible Indian musical? And yet ... you can probably already guess which way this is going to go.
When voicing your opinion you must, like most of the critics, demonstrate that you have really done your best to like this Wuthering Heights musical. A quick string of somewhat feeble compliments should do it. "Kristine Landon-Smith's production makes an agreeable spectacle," says Billington, for instance, adding that, "Sue Mayes's design beautifully evokes russet Rajasthan skies, and the acting is perfectly good."
Or you might observe that Verma's adaptation is "close enough to be familiar and is generally successful," as Ian Shuttleworth of the Financial Times does. "A couple of the songs ... prove haunting, too," says Kate Bassett, piping up to fill an awkward silence in the Independent on Sunday. "I only wish I could recommend [it] with ardency," shrugs the Telegraph's Dominic Cavendish, without any. "You can see how it might look good on the big screen; on stage, it feels dramatically malnourished."
Having tried to like the show, however, it is time to join the chorus of disapproval. Davis, in particular, pulls on his kicking boots. "This half-hearted pairing [of styles] yields neither spectacle nor psychological insight," he thunders. "Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee's lip-synched music – specially recorded in India, although you would hardly guess it – is never more than tepid. And Kristine Landon-Smith's direction delivers little of the visual energy that is the hallmark of the Bollywood industry." He pauses to get his breath back. And then he resumes. "The decision to pepper the dialogue with Hindi phrases is irritating too." Boot. Stamp. Bludgeon. "My Indian wife has taught me quite a few over the years, but I was still left in the dark as my neighbours chuckled away."
To avoid being mistaken for one of Davis's neighours, you might finally want to point out that if you did chuckle, it was only because you found a moment that was laugh-out-loud bad. Helpfully, Bassett has provided this example: "'She walks across the sand, like she's floating on air,' croons the smitten Vijay," Bassett observes, "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."
Do say: Bollywood is so marvellously vibrant and life-affirming.
Don't say: Shouldn't this be about three hours longer?
The reviews reviewed: Not nearly wuthering enough. (Leo Benedictus)

Variety's review is more conventional and not very enthusiastic:

A Bollywood musical version of Emily Bronte's beloved tale is an engaging idea in principle. The melodramatic story of "Wuthering Heights" ostensibly fits into the Bollywood style, and the comparison made between 18th century Rajasthan and 19th century England inevitably prompts reflection on the ways in which ethnicity and class now mingle together in contempo Britain's complicated multiculture. The production also stands to capitalize on the popularity of Indian-themed pop culture post-"Slumdog Millionaire." But this new touring version falls at many key hurdles; weak music, lyrics and performances and muddy direction make for a lumbering 160 minutes.
The story is told in flashback, narrated by mysterious tramp Baba (Shammi Auukh) to Changoo (Divian Ladwa), a young boy he meets in a camel market. Bronte's Cathy becomes headstrong spice merchant's daughter Shakuntala (Youkti Patel), while Heathcliff is Krishan (Pushpinder Chani), a low-caste boy adopted into the family who develops a lifelong bond with Shakuntala.
The latter is enticed into the wealthy world of the high-caste Vijay (Gary Pillai) and eventually marries him, but her head is turned several years later when Krishan returns to the community a wealthy man, just in time for her tragic death. A clever 11th-hour plot twist ties together Baba with the story he's telling and enables a somewhat happy ending.
Spectacle and broad-strokes storytelling are favored over character development, but this seems a faulty choice because lack of access to the characters' psyches makes them come across (particularly in these underpowered performances) as one-sided and somewhat facile.
The Bollywood elements, which were presumably intended to add interest and steer the audience's relationship to the material, are underplayed. That the musical numbers are all prerecorded -- including vocals -- could have been played as an ironic wink, but it remains unclear if auds are meant to actually believe the performers are singing live. Similarly, it's unclear whether Felix Cross and Sheema's repetitious music and Cross' simplistic lyrics ("Me with you and you with me/Be whoever we want to be/Only you can turn the key ...") are intentionally laughable.
Set design and staging choices further hinder engagement, though this is mitigated mildly by the loveliness of Sue Mayes' silken costumes. The stage is made up of a series of slanted diagonal pathways leading up to a raised playing area. The stage floor becomes, unnecessarily, almost exclusively Baba and Changoo's domain, squashing most of the action onto the narrow pathways. Director Kristine Landon-Smith frequently hides key moments in remote corners of the stage and unforgivably places supernumeraries in front of the action during Shakuntala's death scene.
This is not the first foray into Bollywood-style stagings for lead producer Tamasha, a leading British Asian theater org best known for premiering Ayub Khan-Din's play "East Is East," which went on to become an acclaimed film. The company's well-received 1998 tuner "Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral," an adaptation of a Bollywood film, used many of the same conventions (lip synching to a recorded track, for example). Here, however, the creative team has not found a way to satisfyingly transpose the historic story into its new format; the production seems lost between worlds. (Karen Fricker)

But back to the Guardian where our friend (not!) Tanya Gold writes an article entitled 'To understand Amy Winehouse, perhaps we should consider Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea' "inspired" by Lilian Pizzichini's biography of Jean Rhys, The Blue Hour.

She reappeared in 1949 when a radio producer, who wanted to dramatise one of her novels, placed an advertisement in the New Statesman. Jean Rhys, where are you? She was found, and she finally rewrote Wide Sargasso Sea.
The novel is a prequel to Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is about a principled, virginal governess who falls in love with her employer Mr Rochester, but cannot marry him, because he has a wife, an insane and dangerous woman who lives in the attic, and appears only to start fires. It is a rescue fantasy - a book about how a plain woman can be saved by a powerful man. Jean Rhys took a copy of Jane Eyre, a bottle of whisky, and retreated to her bed.
And she wrote it brilliantly, punching Charlotte Brontë in the face with a bottle of Scotch. Wide Sargasso Sea is a cynical version of Jane Eyre - written not by a virginal parson's daughter, but by a woman who has been a drunken destitute. One book is a fantasy of rescue, the other a book about how an addict can never be rescued.

If there was any possibility that Charlotte Brontë and Miss Gold had shared time and space at some point we'd be positive that Charlotte Brontë had done something very bad to offend Ms Gold on purpose. As such a possibility doesn't exist we must simply conclude - yet again - that Ms Gold is highly prejudiced against Charlotte Brontë.

On to something else. According to The Frisky Mother's Day Gift Guide, you fall into the 'classy and refined' category if you...

... knew who Charlotte Bronte was before starting high school (Catherine)

FilmCrunch writes about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to 'pay homage to one of the greatest years for movies by honoring ten legendary films from 1939'. William Wyler's Wuthering Heights is obviously one of them:

Wuthering Heights, based on that tragic book of lost love by the same name, stars Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. This film was nominated for eight statues in ‘39, but Gone With the Wind took almost every single award. Olivier very much wanted his future wife, Vivien Leigh, to play opposite him in the role of Emily. Lucky for film fans, Leigh became the leading lady of GWTW instead. (K.C. Morgan)

In the Academy's website we find more information:

The 10-film 70th anniversary celebration, which will run through August 3, showcases all of the Best Picture nominees from a landmark year that saw the release of an exceptional number of outstanding films. All screenings will be held on Monday evenings at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
June 8 “Wuthering Heights”

Just one blog today: Echostains posts about S.R. Whitehead's book The Brontës' Haworth.

Categories: Books, Haworth, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights