The Brontës in Oxford

The Independent continues discussing Jonathan Holloway's controversial dramatisation of Wuthering Heights. Incidentally, an 'image of Emily Brontë' that actually represents George Henry Lewes (who was said to look like Emily - that's true) has been used to illustrate the article.

WTF, as Emily Brontë wouldn't say, is Radio 3 doing updating Wuthering Heights? Is the original not enough? Are they besieged with a new kind of audience that finds classic drama inaccessible and needs curse-ridden, reality-TV-style dialogue in order to relate?
Well, no, though Radio 3 would probably welcome being besieged by any kind of audience. For once, the Is-Nothing-Sacred school was wrong and Jonathan Holloway's adaptation had me glued to my radio like Catherine to Heathcliff's window. Not because of the language, though parts of the world's most romantic story were more like being shut in a Leeds pub at closing time. [...]
But how shocking is that? Frankly, a true updating of Wuthering Heights would have Heathcliff arrested for hanging Isabella's dog, and Cathy in therapy for unhealthy co-dependency. At times, gratuitous swearing detracted from the aching beauty of the dialogue. Catherine's stirring appeal, for example, acquired an ungainly expletive. "If the whole world was laid waste and only Heathcliff remained, I would still be happy, but if all else remained and he was annihilated then I would wish the whole fucking universe was burned to a cinder." But, ultimately, it was the use of rich, authentic Yorkshire accents that came as a surprise in this satisfying drama, rather than a few old F-words. (Jane Thynne)

The Oxford Times reviews Shared Experience's revival of Polly Teale's Brontë. The article opens with a reference to Jonathan Holloway's adaptation too:

Shock, horror, a few days ago there was a top-of-the-page story that Radio 3 is to broadcast a new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which both Cathy and Heathcliff will utter the f-word. Proof, if proof were needed, that the Brontës and their novels remain right at the forefront of public interest.
In Polly Teale’s play Brontë, drunken Branwell doesn’t actually mouth the f-word as he stumbles back into Haworth Parsonage, but nonetheless he has an explosive effect on his three sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne — not to mention on his deeply religious and conventional father, the Rev Patrick Brontë. Teale’s parsonage is a grey, dreary, place (atmospherically suggested by Ruth Sutcliffe’s set design), and the sisters live claustrophobic, repressed lives within its walls. Their escape is in their writing: “I write to leave behind my miserable body,” says Charlotte, “I write to be unknown, unknowing, to exist outside and beyond myself.”
Teale’s play is extraordinarily ambitious. It fuses grinding domestic routine (“Mother was not there to organize tea parties, or make us wear pretty frocks”) with each sister’s very different personality, and then adds characters from the novels themselves. [...]
As scene follows scene in quick-fire succession, the character of each sister is built up. Domestic disputes are supplemented by sometimes barbed exchanges of literary opinion — spiced, in due course, by the arrival of publishers’ rejection letters. Charlotte (Kristin Atherton) comes over as the most antagonistic and dominant, yet sexually repressed, of the three, while Emily (Elizabeth Crarer) is much more wild — perhaps a little too much 21st-century rebelliousness jumps out here. Meanwhile the lesser-known Anne (Flora Nicholson) features as the great appeaser: she seems the nicest of the three. Circling round are the boorish Branwell (Mark Edel-Hunt), so out of control that at one point he makes a dive for Charlotte’s crotch (another 21st-century touch too far?), and wonderfully obsequious curate Bell Nicholls (Stephen Finegold), who appears to be directly modeled on Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice.
The overall result is a gripping, if stern, evening of theatre. Teale writes extremely well, as befits a play about such major literary figures. You can quarrel about some of the details, but you are left with an overwhelming impression of three truly extraordinary women. (Giles Woodforde)

The Times also reviews this production and gives it four stars. The article begins with sad news, though:

Shared Experience was one of the losers in yesterday’s Arts Council cuts, dropping off the funding list altogether. A shame for any theatre company — and a great shame for theatregoers when the company concerned is capable of work as oddly potent as this. Polly Teale’s play, first seen in 2005, asks how three women who rarely strayed from their Yorkshire parsonage came to write three world-beating masterpieces. Well, OK, two world-beating: “I am not so interesting to you,” as Anne Brontë admits to the audience early on in a production that began life last year at the tiny Watermill theatre in Newbury. I wondered at first how three actors, who start in modern dress before donning their 1840s garb, could make this bioplay fill a big space. But Nancy Meckler’s production shows the virtues of her and Teale’s company. Using physicality, lighting, ambient music above all a sense of the mysterious allied to propulsive storytelling, they create a vivid theatrical landscape that creates a rare sense of intimacy. And intimacy, Teale suggests, was something the Brontës could only really achieve in acts of imagination. Charlotte and Emily are the stars, as we peer at their straitened lives and see how Heathcliff and Mrs Rochester provided a relief from a world where they were supposed to serve men. On a stark stage, we are fed the facts or something like them. The sisters defer to their stern Irish dad and help their feckless brother Branwell. The greater the sense of isolation and confinement, the more wild and persuasive the sisters’ work becomes. Emily might look to be suffering from adolescent ennui, except we know that inside her she had Wuthering Heights — or Windy Heights, as her publisher asked her to call it. Charlotte, called “the weasel” at school, strives to be “free from her unfortunate body” by writing. Bioplays sometimes rush from one crucial event to another, mainlining on pivotal moments but leaving out life. Sometimes Brontë is visibly packing in the info, but mostly but it has a theatrical identity of its own. Frances McNamee stalks the stage in white as Emily’s Cathy, in red as Charlotte’s Mrs Rochester. The two male actors also play Brontë characters, interacting with the sisters, venting that buried passion. It calls for physicality, playfulness: get the tone wrong and it could be portentous, a jumble. But a fine cast judge it beautifully: Kristin Atherton is a taut Charlotte, Elizabeth Carer a churning Emily, Flora Nicholson a more pragmatic Anne. There is no one answer to what made these women what they were. But this evocative show is full of ideas, full of life. (Dominic Maxwell)

Before Eleanor Birne picks her 'top 10 books on motherhood' for the Guardian, she pauses to reflect:

There are weirdly few credible portraits of mothers in English fiction. Eighteenth and 19th-century novels, where one would normally start to look for such things, are full of orphans: there are governesses and surrogate mothers such as Jane Eyre or Miss Havisham, but the mother herself is often the hole at the centre of the story. What, you wonder, were novelists avoiding? Is there something about motherhood that fiction doesn't like?

In the particular case of the Brontës - with the exceptions of Agnes Grey and partly Shirley - they were merely writing of what they knew.

Also in the Guardian, Carmen Callil writes a profile of Italian writer Dacia Maraini. Callil considers that,

The Silent Duchess will, probably, remain her masterpiece, her Jane Eyre, replete with the added perfumes, flavours and smells of Gattopardoesque Sicily.

NorthJersey.com has another writer join the ranks of Brontëites: L.A. Kuehlke, author of the novel Pursuit.

Like her other interests — including her love of "Jane Eyre" and Starbucks — faith naturally found itself in the novel. (Stephanie Schwartz)

And it looks like Jane Eyre 2011 is not the only current film with a Brontë connection. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, this is part of the plot of Cat Run:

She and her baby are also tracked by Helen (Janet McTeer), a tony assassin with cheeky calling cards identifying her as Virginia Woolf and Emily Brontë. (Bill Stamets)

The Brontë Sisters mourns the death of Charlotte Brontë on a day like today in 1855. All Things Historical Fiction reviews Jane Eyre and CTrent29 Journal has uploaded screencaps from the 1983 adaptation of the novel. The Sleepless Reader has finished reading Villette. Abigail's Ateliers posts pictures of a dress that Caroline Helstone from Charlotte Brontë's Shirley would have worn. So Why Don't We Go Somewhere Only We Know? posts about Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights