Good reviews for Brontë and Jane Eyre in Wingfield Manor

A couple of newspapers review Polly Teale's Brontë on stage at The Watermill Theatre until May 22nd. The Guardian says:

Where does creativity spring from? Are artists born or made? How could three lonely women living on the bleak Yorkshire moors more than 150 years ago have created some of literature's most vibrant characters in plain Jane Eyre, the mad Mrs Rochester and the passionate, untamed Cathy and Heathcliff?
Polly Teale's densely satisfying play eschews traditional bio-drama in favour of something theatrically wilder and emotionally pressing: mixing fact and fiction. Real people and characters from the novels collide in the whirligig of the imagination. "Is it true?" people will ask. The better question might be: is it emotionally true? It may be pure speculation, but it is not impossible that Charlotte burned Emily's second novel after her sister's death. We might today call that cultural vandalism; she may have called it love.
On the Watermill's suffocatingly small stage, the Haworth parsonage parlour becomes a prison in Ruth Sutcliffe's impressive, simple design, where it is the imagination, not a tiny, high window, that lets in the light. The sisters and their brother, Branwell, upon whom everybody's hopes rest, play childhood games that have no limits, creating imaginary countries and warring armies. But as approaching womanhood constricts the sisters as surely as the corsets they must wear, so freedom and the opportunity to venture into the world beyond the moors destroys Branwell, whose only legacy is his famous portrait of his three grave sisters.
The more the sisters' world telescopes down, the greater their imaginative reach, the richer their emotional hinterlands. Teale explores all this superbly in an evening that is as much sensed as it is fully known, and where the characters from the novels and the sisters themselves share the stage in a seamless melding of inner lives and outer reality.
Charlotte, painfully consumed by unrequited love, has Mrs Rochester reproachfully staring over her shoulder – as if the madwoman in the attic has already taken up residence in her psyche. The show is brilliant on sisterly affections and resentments, a relationship magnified by the smallness of their existence and the magnitude of their ambitions.
Some acquaintance with their books and the Brontë lives is necessary for full enjoyment, but even without it this would be a richly rewarding evening about the catalyst for creativity and the lure of immortality when you see death all around you. Nancy Meckler's production has cultivated vivid performances and ensures that what might, in clumsier hands, seem overwrought instead appears perfectly and passionately pitched. (Lyn Gardner)

The Oxford Times review is good too:

‘Why do we do it? What is it for?” asks Anne Brontë (Flora Nicholson) towards the end of Polly Teale’s powerful play Brontë. Inevitably, this is reminiscent of the cri de coeur in the last moments of Chekhov’s Three Sisters: “Some day people will know . . . what the purpose of all this suffering is.”
One big difference, though: while Olga thought that “people won’t even know that there were once three of us here”, everybody knows of the three sisters of Haworth Parsonage. Their literary achievements, coupled with the sad circumstances of their lives, guarantee their immortality.
The audiences packing into the Watermill are testament to our enduring fascination with their story, which is here told as lucidly, and as movingly, as one could hope for.
The production is a revival, in rejigged form, of a play from Shared Experience that toured five years ago. On that occasion, the playwright herself took charge; this time, Nancy Meckler, a director famed for her inspirational commitment to physical theatre, brings her skills to bear on the piece.
The result is a gripping, if emotionally draining, evening of theatre in which we learn not just the facts of the lives of the Brontës, but of the influences upon them, the relationships and rivalries, that lay behind their literary achievements.
Their very different personalities are nicely drawn, the meticulous fusspot Charlotte (Kristin Atherton [...]) who was to develop a strange streak of vanity, the dreamy loner Emily (Elizabeth Crarer [...]), the down-to-earth, ‘governessy’ Anne. We meet, too, their drunken hellhound of a brother Branwell (Mark Edel-Hunt), their doddery, endearing but occasionally vitriolic old dad, and some of their disturbing literary creations, including Cathy, Heathcliffe and the mad Mrs Rochester.
In short, the whole picture. (Christopher Gray)

And The Public Reviews gives it 3 1/2 stars:

This is yet another very distinctive offering from Shared Experience who have produced an intense, emotional and very thought provoking piece in Polly Teale’s cleverly written ‘Bronte’.
Teale utilises factual and fictional characters to tell the story of the Bronte sisters miserable existence being continually uplifted via their imagination as characters from their novels burst forth leaving you, at least thinking, you understand what drove them to literary success.
Director Nancy Meckler has given us a non stop and very sensitive portrayal of the siblings that highlights how very different the three were. Designer Ruth Sutcliffe has provided an appropriate dark, soul destroying set with Tim Lutkin’s lighting used to great effect to bring home the difference between the girls real home life and the stories from the page.
Flora Nicholson gives an emotion charged performance as the least known sister ‘Anne’, whilst Elizabeth Carer’s ‘Emily’ leaves you in no doubt that she is the free spirit that just can not break free.
Performance of the night though comes from Kristin Atherton who, as ‘Charlotte’, may ‘tow the line’ but as the most imaginative and effective of the trio clearly has the strength and willpower to highlight the real strengths of the downtrodden female.
Mark Edel-Hunt makes a very decent job of showing just how repulsive brother ‘Branwell’ was and our characters from the books are very effectively brought to life by Frances McNamee as ‘Cathy’ and ‘Mrs. Rochester’, whilst David Fielder turns up as ‘Mr. Rochester’ as well as playing the girls hard line father and Charlotte’s eventual, but strange choice, husband ‘Curate Bell Nicholls’.
Certainly different, certainly very entertaining and certainly well worth a visit. (Jim Nicholson)

The Independent comments on the recent Madwomen in the Attic (still vailable online):

In Madwomen in the Attic a selection of madwomen in literature, including Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason, Madame Bovary and Anne Catherick from The Woman in White were put on the couch by analysts including Adam Phillips and Dinesh Bhugra, president of the Royal College of Physicians, who together could have put the Victorian novel industry out of business. Madame Bovary was prescribed couples therapy, plus medication for a possible bipolar disorder. Anne Catherick had learning disabilities and Bertha Mason's burning down Thornfield Manor could simply have been averted had Mr Rochester explored anti-psychotics and occupational therapy. "Occupational therapy?" asked a bemused Vivienne Parry. "What would you do? Knit antimacassars?" "Not play with matchsticks," agreed Dinesh Bhugra.
Amusing though this was, there was a serious point. As John Sutherland said, "A lot of Victorian fiction is about how you get rid of a wife. If a woman misbehaved it was very easy to get two doctors to certify her and lock her up." Dickens threatened to do it to his wife, Kate, when he took off with an actress, and Thackeray had his wife confined. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a millionaire MP, had his wife, Rosina, certified when she harangued him at the hustings, and thereafter she offered him some literary help to create "the most dastardly villain in literary history – my husband."
Freud said wherever he went a great novelist had got there before him, and as this programme showed, on the subject of what constitutes mental disorder and how it should be treated, the novelists easily pipped the psychologists to the post. (Jane Thynne)

Lovereading also writes about the programme though not quite so accurately:

According to the BBC, one of Bronte's tragic female heroines, Bertha Rochester of her most famed novel Jane Eyre, drew uncanny similarities to that of the writer's own brother.
Anne Dinsdale, an archivist at the Haworth Parsonage, which once housed the Bronte family, told the news provider that the author's spouse Branwell was a drug addict, who was plagued by depression, much the same as the ill-fated Mrs Rochester.
Furthermore, in an apparent act of madness Branwell once set fire to his bed, an action that was again mirrored by the character in Jane Eyre.
Ms Dinsdale reveals that while Charlotte was penning her work at home, "Branwell would have been raving in the bedroom on the second floor, where he had been confined because he was a danger".
However, despite her apparent first-hand experience of insanity, Bronte was criticised for her depictions of madness at the time the book went to press in 1847.
Now, almost 200 years since the author's birth in 1816, attitudes have somewhat shifted and it is unlikely she would receive the same cold response. (Jane Caulfield)

We have listened to the programme and we can state one thing for sure at least: Branwell was never said to be 'the author's spouse' (he was her brother). And it might be the way it's written but it looks as if Bertha, like Branwell, 'was a drug addict, who was plagued by depression'. We don't know about depression, but we are sure that Bertha was no drug addict, poor thing.

On the subject of madness, The Occidental Weekly has an article on the National Conference of Undergraduate Research (NCUR). One of the presentations is thus described:

A third delivered a little too chipper of a talk on madness in the novels of the Bronte sisters in a speech two pom poms shy of a cheerleading routine. (Richie DeMaria)

The book Twitterature by Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman is reviewed by The Ram:

Written in the rather snarky, tongue-in-cheek manner which I love, the book allots two to three pages, each with about seven to 12 tweets, per book, generally written from the protagonist’s point of view. Some are genuinely descriptive of the plot (“This strange man has a secret about Rochester. He says that Rochester’s got another wife locked in the attic!” from Jane Eyre), while others offer useless but hilarious commentary (“What do you mean ‘where am I? I’m right under the balcony! Does no one understand English anymore?” from Romeo and Juliet). (Celester Kmiotek)

The Richland Chronicle book reviewer can't see any difference between Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca:

So basically, I ended up re-reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It's the same plot set in a different time period and not nearly as engaging. (Tamara Loggins)

Terminal Gamer describes the videogame Fable III as follows:

The manor in which the hero stands recalls Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte. It is a victorian-era mansion with its richly colored walls, heavily decorated banisters and carpeted stairwell. In addition, the hero himself carries a unique dress style. A sword hangs off his back and yet he wears pants made for riding, an undeniably cool-looking jacket and what has mutton chops that certainly evoke the styles of Victorian England.
While Fable III takes place in a fictional world it draws heavily upon influences such as Austen and Dickens. An industrial revolution is sweeping the land and you take control of Albion by force and then must rule and please those whom you made promises to in your rise to power. (Geoffrey Calver)

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Jane Austen wasn't a Victorian at all, we are grateful for the actual description of the house, as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë created completely different houses.

Den of Geek lists '10 films that were rumoured to be ghost-directed' and though Jane Eyre 1944 is not one of them, it is mentioned nonetheless:

[Orson] Welles' hand was also rumoured to be more prevalent than declared in other projects too. Also in some degree of contention was La Decade Prodigieuse, a French movie from Claude Chabrol and the 1944 adaptation of Jane Eyre that was supposedly helmed by Robert Stevenson. (Simon Brew)

Ordinary Art has posted a poem on Emily Brontë/Wuthering Heights and Olvasni jó writes in Hungarian about Wuthering Heights. Examiner celebrated Charlotte Brontë's brithday yesterday. Booksquawk reviews Jane Eyre and Crich Tramway Village News confirms (with a couple of pictures of the trucks, etc.) what 'anonymous' wrote in a comment:

Latest location for Jane Eyre (20 April 10) has been Wingfield Manor, near Alfreton, Derbyshire. The film unit was based in the car park at Crich Tramway Village, a few miles away.
No - Jane Eyre never ever travelled by tramcar!
The unit has now returned to Haddon Hall for further filming.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Theatre