"Wuthering Heights is like the Bollywood Mamma Mia!"

Three Wuthering Heights-related adaptations are today in the press. First, The Guardian announces the upcoming London performances (17-30 May, Linbury Studio Theatre) of Cathy Marston's Wuthering Heights ballet which was premiered last March in Bern, Switzerland:

British-born choreographer Cathy Marston has joined the (now depressingly diminishing) ranks of female ballet directors with her recent appointment to run Bern:Ballett. The post also gives her wider opportunities to create work, and as she brings the Swiss company over for its debut British season, Marston also gives the UK a premiere of Wuthering Heights. Marston has always delivered a refreshing slant on the concept of the story ballet, her approach less a literal narration of events than a subtle delving of emotional and psychological subtext. Hopefully, with Wuthering Heights, there will be a minimum of blasted heaths and gothic symbolism and instead a choreographed focus on Brontë's themes of desire, revenge and transgression. The ballet is a collaboration with dramaturge Edward Kemp and composer David Maric, whose score has been specially commissioned. (Judith Mackrell)

The second one is Tamasha's Wuthering Heights. The Northern Echo publishes an interview with Deepak Verma where besides talking about the current theatrical production, explains details of the cinematographical adaptation project:

Ex-EastEnder Deepak Verma is confident that an Indian Wuthering Heights is a winner.
THE race is on to find a Bollywood movie with the international clout of Mamma Mia! and ex- EastEnders actor Deepak Verma feels he has a frontrunner with a stage musical based on Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights.
“This is a romance which transcends any lifetime, it’s something that will be there forever.
It’s a great parallel to all the beliefs in Indian culture. The British social hierarchy in which this is set is like the Indian caste system,” he says of the storyline of the poor boy who can never marry a rich man’s daughter.
North-East theatregoers can judge for themselves next week when the turbulent romance of Heathcliff and Cathy, reset from the Yorkshire Moors to the desert of Rajasthan and starring Krishan (Pushpinder Chani) and Shakuntala (Youkti Patel), arrives at Northern Stage from Wednesday to Saturday. “I love the story of a character who changes the whole balance. In this case, Krishan/Heathcliff goes away to become a bigger man than the one Cathy marries because he wants her so much. The whole thing is a feast for the senses and we’ve set it in the most colourful and exciting part of India,”says Verma,.
This is Verma’s second project with the Tamasha company and artistic director Kristine Landon-Smith, who first captured the attention of the world with East is East in 1999. The two worked on Ghostdancing, an Indian reworking of Zola’s Therese Raquin, about lovers murdering a husband, before gaining Oldham Coliseum and Lyric Hammersmith backing for Wuthering Heights.
Designer Sue Mayes travelled to Rajasthan to research the set and costumes and Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee have composed the music weaving in authentic folklore tunes.
Verma is still famous to millions as the womanising market trader Sanjay Kapoor but, since he left the wiles of Walford in 1998, the actor has also moved into writing and TV and film production as boss of Pukkanasha Films. He’s just spent five days at the Cannes Film Festival pitching his own romantic comedy Johnny Bollywood and seeking backers for Wuthering Heights the movie.
“I’m not a musician but the story, the book and the idea were all mine. I did need the help of a lyricist. We then picked out the parts of the book we wanted and focused on turning them into a musical. The great thing about Tamasha and Kristine Landon- Smith, who is also directing, is that she is very forward thinking. The company has created the Bollywood bandwagon that others are jumping on. We’re keen to take it further and we’re already working on taking it into the West End. I’m also putting together a movie project,” adds Verma, who spent four years bringing Wuthering Heights to the stage.
“I could never be just an actor, although I have been, I’ve got a lot of good stories I want to bring to the world. Sometimes you have to go where the love is… and at the moment everyone is pushing this project.
Wuthering Heights will be filmed in India but we’re still in negotiations to see if its going to be an Indian, British or American production team. It’s like the Bollywood Mamma Mia! but even if it’s two per cent successful as that we’ll be happy,” he says.
Verma will be unhappy with an international cast approach and points out that Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire didn’t set out to become a worldwide success. “It was an Indian film about an Indian character, but it broke out because it had integrity and Danny Boyle is an amazing director,” says the globetrotting film company boss who is heading for New York next.

The Southampton performances of the play (June 2-6) are presented on the Southern Daily Echo.

The third one is the broadcast of Wuthering Heights 2009 in Belgium (see sidebar) which appears today in several Belgium news outlets: Showbizzsite, Nieuwsblad and Humo (which includes a brief interview with Tom Hardy):

Uitstekend nieuws voor liefhebbers van knellende hemdsboorden, grove bakkebaarden en strakke korsetten: op Eén staat vanavond het eerste deel van 'Wuthering Heights' geprogrammeerd, naar de klassieke roman van Emily Brontë.
Grootste troef van dit kostuumdrama: een somberende (anti)held die in geen enkel opzicht moet onderdoen voor Mr. Darcy, de afstandelijke romanticus die van de adaptatie van Jane Austens 'Sense and Sensibility' zo'n succes maakte. De rol van Heathcliff wordt gespeeld door Tom Hardy, een acteur die er zelf ook een woelig verleden op nahoudt. (Google translation)

A picnic in Haworth is what The Independent suggests in a 50 Best Picnic Spots article:

Five minutes’ walk from the centre of the brooding West Yorkshire village of Haworth – famously the site of the Brönte Parsonage – miles of heather moorland begin. Strike out here on a sunny day and find a rocky outcrop to "enjoy the vibrantly coloured views whilst tucking into a tasty picnic", advises Laurence. (Rhiannon Batten)

The Daily Telegraph (Australia) has an article about the use of 'weather language' in literature. The Brontës are doubly mentioned:

Wild weather also loomed large as an expression of unnatural goings-on in the works of the Bronte sisters' classics.
At the very outset of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Lockwood is trapped at Heathcliff's house by a storm. While there, he dreams of a ghost and awakens in terror, screaming, thus setting off the events of the novel.
Emily's sister Charlotte also uses the device in Jane Eyre.
Just as Jane accepts the already married Rochester's marriage proposal, wild winds stir and the skies open, and heaven's displeasure at the unnatural and sinful prospect of a bigamous marriage is registered in no uncertain terms. (Chris Hook)

Mint (India) talks about first and second novels:

The Times’ Top 10 list of “Cursed Second Novels” includes some of the best-known names in fiction: Norman Mailer, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Irvine Welsh.

Others have escaped inclusion by either never attempting another full-length novel—J.D. Salinger, for example, limited himself to novellas and short stories in the wake of Catcher in the Rye—or by simply never writing again, as did Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee, Emily Bronte and Arundhati Roy (though she recently announced her return to fiction, and is supposedly working on her second novel).(Lakshmi Chaudhry)

The Globe and Mail visits the Abney Park Cemetery in London. The article includes Brontë sightings:

Just then a man steps out from the side of the chapel. He's tall, bearded, wearing a long coat. It's a moment straight out of Great Expectations or maybe Wuthering Heights : Here is Heathcliff's spectre haunting the deserted grange. My instinct is to walk casually in the other direction, but David's gaze is fixed forward. The scene is too perfect, too literary, and it transcends his regular social mores. He steps toward the man. (Martha Schabas)

The Age publishes an extract from Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman. The extract contains a quote from G.K. Chesterton that can be of interest to the readers of this blog:

G. K. Chesterton tried to defend Austen's understanding of male psychology, even if her knowledge of male physicality seems a little limited. "(When Darcy says) 'I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory' ... he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than was ever hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontes' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's."

The quote is from The Victorian Age in Literature (Chapter 2), 1913.

Elizabeth Ann Persimmons in The Examiner is a bit naïf trying to define Romanticism:

Did you ever read Wuthering Heights? That is one screwed up book. Nobody is normal. But it’s “romantic.” Let me define “romantic”: you think something should be a certain way because you feel so strongly about it. You think you deserve someone who is, frankly, out of your league, so you won’t “settle.”

Público (Portugal) publishes the obituary of the Portuguese historian João Bénard da Costa. Talking about his articles on cinema, he links together Emily Brontë and James Mason (!):

Ou Emily Brontë a propósito de James Mason, "a voz". (Alexandra Lucas Coelho) (Google translation)

Diario de Sevilla (Spain) publishes an article about women, books and memories:

Gran verdad que se demuestra en la memoria agradecida que todos guardamos de quienes nos contagiaron la lectura. Apele cada lector a su memoria infantil. En mi caso, al igual que en el de Savater, está mi madre leyendo a Agatha Christie, Edgard Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner o Rafael Sabatini en las ediciones de quiosco de la Biblioteca Oro de Editorial Molino; y a las Brönte, Pereda, Galdós o Palacio Valdés en los gustosos volúmenes de Aguilar que -buen cuero envejecido con nobleza- conservo. (Carlos Colón) (Google translation)

Jane Campion's latest film Bright Star is reviewed on ÉcranLarge:

On en ressort un peu sur le flanc avec l'envie de relire Les Hauts de Hurlevent d'Emily Brontë. (Sandy Gillet) (Google translation)

Le Matin (Switzerland) interviews the author Guillaume Musso who once again shows his Brontëiteness:

Avec ce nouveau livre, vous avez à nouveau laissé le grand romantique qui est en vous prendre la plume. Vous retrouvez-vous dans ce terme?
Il ne me gêne pas, mais je n'aime pas le terme «romantique» au sens «fleur bleue». Plus jeune, j'aimais bien le romantisme des auteurs anglais comme Emily Brontë ou Jane Austen. Mes histoires incorporent toutes une histoire d'amour, mais l'amour au sens large: familial, amoureux ou d'amitié. Toutes les sortes d'amour m'intéressent. (Anne-Sylvie Sprenger) (Google translation)

Briefer notes: The Times' Travel section devotes an article to a walk around Hebden Waster, in Brontë country, Erodiade2008 on YouTube reads two poems by Emily Brontë in Italian and in English, Sashika Corea has two posts on Jane Eyre and Heathcliff.

Categories: Brontëites, Dance, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Poetry, References, Theatre, Translations, Wuthering Heights