A Shaolin Monk dancing in the Champions League

Let's start with a couple of reviews of Wuthering Heights adaptations:

First, Cathy Marston's Wuthering Heights ballet is reviewed in The Independent:

If you were to condense the plot of Wuthering Heights and put it in a teabag, the result would make a pretty thin brew. This may be why Emily Brontë's wild and blustery love story has proved such a draw for the stage. What people tend to remember from the book isn't who did what to whom, but what it felt like. Atmosphere is all – howling gales, moorland crags, hard box-beds, the glowering dark – which partly explains why, just as a Bollywood musical version closes in the West End, a contemporary dance treatment has blown in from Switzerland. Directors can't leave it alone.
And sure enough, the best thing about Cathy Marston's 70-minute Wuthering Heights for Bern Ballet is the feeling it captures with minimal means. A few irregular blocks do for the upland scenery, providing slopes for the lovers to gambol on and clifftops to wuther them. Designer Jann Messerli also does drop-down bamboo blinds which clatter oppressively like anger darkening a mind. David Maric's score, for electronics and live double bass, is a meterological marvel with its high, sighing melodies and rumbling climaxes that threaten to burst into heavy rock but never do.
At the start, too, Marston's choreography is thrillingly outdoorsy, suggesting endless space as Jenny Tattersall's Cathy flips and scampers, repeatedly flinging herself, spread-eagled, into Gary Marshall's Heathcliff to hook a leg around his shoulder and wind around his neck. It's fast, free, virtuosic stuff, joyfully executed.
The trouble comes when other characters intrude. There is Hindley (Cathy's nasty brother), Edgar (her rich husband-to-be), and Isabella (Edgar's prim sister), yet little of consequence happens. No wonder Marston felt obliged to amplify the leading pair with four other Cathy and Heathcliff couples, who echo their steps at moments of heightened emotion. And that's most of the time. All praise to Tattersall for her intensity, but, frankly, after Cathy's fourth or fifth tortured duet with the moody hunk she apparently doesn't want but can't keep her hands off, I was itching to give the girl a hard slap. For all its ingenuity, this Wuthering Heights serves only to highlight the frustrating aspects of the original. (Jenny Gilbert)

The Northern Echo reviews Tamasha's Wuthering Heights with an overdose of metaphors:

WHEN it comes to an arranged marriage between brooding Bronte and the bling of Bollywood, there are signs that Tamasha’s efforts are close to hitting the Wuther-lode.
Ex-EastEnder Deepak Verma’s inspiration of switching the brusqueness of the Yorkshire Moors for the sandstorms and heated passions of Indian’s Rajasthan desert adds the essential Asian dimension to this well-worn love story.
Thus fiery Heathcliff becomes Krishan (Pushpinder Chani) and headstrong Cathy is Shakuntala (Youkti Patel), locked in a lifetime of impossible love.
But what of the ambitions of this becoming a full-blown Bollywood musical, with a film version already being discussed? Surely you need songs with as much instant appeal as Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, not to mention the unromantic element of comedy characters?
Verma and director Kristine Landon-Smith cleverly turn to the lip-synched music and lyrics of Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee, which bravely attempts the leap between traditional regional sounds and contemporary composition.
Most of the laughter is produced by bickering servants Ayah (Rina Fatania) and Yusuf (Adeel Akhtar), although even a glossary of Hindi words at the back of the book/programme fails to help with some sharp, clearly-funny exchanges, which even shoot over the heads of the native language speakers in the audience.
Verma cheekily throws in a homage to My Fair Lady with The Camel Races song matching the eye-catching Ascot scene, complete with infamous four-letter word.
Major complaints are that the lengthy first half is clearly in need of a trim, with actors taking ages to make an entrance for no apparent reason, and Chani’s portrayal of Krishan lurches towards Captain Hook in need of a chiropractor.
Using a series of ramps is clever, but not always easy to negotiate for a hard-working 11-strong cast, varying in terms of age, size and colourful dress.
This heart-warming project may not have reached the heights in all areas, but Wednesday’s opening night was a lot nearer Barcelona than Manchester. (Viv Hardwick)

Another usual suspect in recent reviews is Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour. Today's The Scotsman's turn:

Rhys is the Caribbean-born writer who spent much of her life in Europe, personified the louche life in ways that have guaranteed her an everlasting cult following and stunningly amplified Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre by writing one of the few great books hitched to an existing classic.
That is Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that envisions the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the one locked in Mr Rochester's attic. (Janet Maslin)

Precisely, The Times talks about Rebecca Hall and mentions her role as Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea 2006:

The closest she has come so far to losing all control is as Jean Rhys’s pyromaniac heroine in the BBC’s Wide Sargasso Sea. (Jasper Rees)

The Independent (Ireland) interviews Ronald Masin and Maria Kelerman (from the Young European Strings) who reminds of us the following anecdote:

"I think it was more Ronald who chose me, because I didn't think of myself as being very attractive," says Maria. "I was so busy trying to survive life and learn French, that I wasn't attracted to anyone. We had to communicate with one another in English, some of which I learned from reading Wuthering Heights with a dictionary beside me." (Andrea Smith)

The theatrical agent Duncan Heath talks with his daughter Laura in The Times. This reference,we hope, is not to be taken literally:

My biggest wish is for her to meet someone and be happy. But she’s a great romantic. She doesn’t want free love; she wants Wuthering Heights.

The Times also brings another bizarre story. Do you imagine Shaolin monks being inspired by Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights choreography? Reality surpasses fiction:

The few in the West who are at home in their bodies are dancers such as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, born in 1976 in Belgium, to a Catholic mother and Moroccan Muslim father. At 14, he saw Kate Bush performing Wuthering Heights and was knocked out.
“I was quite chubby,” Cherkaoui says, “and very much a brain child, but I really loved the way she was moving. I thought it would be so liberating to be able to move like that. I started imitating artists with some friends. I think the body really needs to use its intelligence to do things. When you’re a child, your body screams to do things.” (Bryan Appleyard)

Movies Buzz classifies Wuthering Heights 1939 as one of the Top 10 Love Stories. Bloggerel informs (quoting the last issue of The Bookseller) how the recently published Swedish translation of Agnes Grey (see this previous post) enters the top 10 of April bestsellers (is number six, no less). The book by Anne Brontë is reviewed by holydread. Pequena Infante has bought the Complete Brontë Collection and Corner of the Library posts a nice bookmark with the Brontë Waterfall.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Dance, Music, References, Theatre, Translations, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights