September: a real Brontë fest

The Telegraph and Argus takes a peek behind the scenes of Blake Morrison's forthcoming play We Are Three Sisters, to be directed on stage by Barrie Rutter.

Next month, actors and writers are due to congregate in Haworth to promote the autumn premiere of Blake Morrison’s new play about the Brontë sisters.
Juliet Barker, biographer of the extraordinary Brontë family, will be there, along with actors from Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company, as well as Blake, a writer of poetry and plays who specialises in giving the language of his theatrical works a Yorkshire twist. [...]
We Are Three Sisters, his latest [play], was influenced by Chekhov’s 1901 comic drama of provincial unease The Three Sisters.
“Chekhov had read about the Brontës shortly before writing The Three Sisters,” he adds. “The likeliest source was Mrs Gaskell’s 1857 biography of Charlotte Brontë, commissioned after her death by her father Patrick.”
“So there are good reasons for transplanting the play to Haworth and identifying Irene, Masha and Olga with Anne, Emily and Charlotte – they even have a troubled and self-destructive brother in common.
“Above all, I hope that, by taking a cue from Chekhov, the play will banish the gloom surrounding the Brontës and reveal the Northern humour and resilience they showed, despite the ever-present threat of death and disease.
“In other words, I’d like to honour the truth of the Brontës while showing Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell and Patrick as they’ve never been seen before.”
“If you read Charlotte’s letters, there is a real spirit and wit and humour about them that has never been brought out.
“The Brontës tend to be portrayed as poor, tragic victims – figures of gloom,” Blake adds, saying it was a matter of getting away from these stereotypes.
Arguably, people are drawn to the Brontës because they are tragic figures. Branwell, Emily and Anne all died of TB within the space of nine months, from September 1848 to May 1849. Charlotte died in March 1855. Patrick Brontë, old and blind, outlived his entire family. [...]
“It’s going to be a real Brontë fest in September,” Blake says. If he’s lucky, his play, directed by Barrie Rutter, will benefit from any extra interest created by these films. At the moment he’s still writing the script.
“This is the fifth draft now. Costumes and stage designs are still unfolding – casting has been done, I think; but undoubtedly there will be re-writes until the last minute.
“There are 70 pages of text, so I don’t think it will be a long play; but we won’t know until it’s up and running,” he adds.
Part of the purpose of the half-day at Haworth on July 21 is a cast read-through before an invited audience at the Baptist Chapel. Afterwards, a social event with drinks and nibbles is planned for the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Chekhov’s play is set in the provinces. The elder of the Russian writer’s three sisters, Olga, is forever pining to leave the suffocating boredom of the army outpost where the family lives and return to busy life of Moscow where she was born.
Blake’s play is set in Haworth in 1848, “in a gloomy parsonage where there are neither curtains nor comforts”. This is where his three sisters light up their self-contained world with laughter, dreams and ideas; and writing, always writing.
The Brontë sisters, of course, were born in Thornton and later migrated over the hills to not so far away Haworth. But London, insists Blake, was on the minds of at least two of them.
“Anne and Charlotte were interested in London. They were the two who made the trip to see the London publisher. Emily wouldn’t go because she wanted to stay at home.” (Jim Greenhalf)

We must say, though, that Emily did go to London en route to Brussels and, according to Mary Taylor, they did see as many things there as possible in just one day.

Anyway, another Brontë-inspired creative mind was Bernard Herrmann's, whose approaching centenary (June 29th) is beginning to trigger articles on his remarkable work, with mentions to his Brontë compositions, such as today on both Long Island Film Examiner and The Jewish Daily Forward.

And speaking of adaptations, etc., The Times of India discusses 'the journey for a book to a movie':

Most of us get excited when we hear that our favourite book is going to turn into a movie. We might even get all excited and go see the movie. The movie would have been incredibly, no doubt. And with all that excitement you go watch the movie. What if the movie is a total buzzkill? The scenes you envisioned cut thanks to the time factor (and also money!). Popular movies are based on books; from classics such Wuthering Heights to the latest Edward fever, everything seems to be turning celluloid. So the ultimate question here is; the book or movie? Which one would you prefer? It's not an easy answer. The answer however lies somewhere in between. [...]
Movies also help children understand the importance of classics like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice.

The Globe and Mail tells part of the story of Alice and Rebecca Walker:

Rebecca Walker, whose mother, Alice, wrote the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Color Purple, is one of the better-known memoirists to criticize the way their author-parent raised them. Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence describes the younger Walker’s painful teenage years, when her radical feminist mother rejected her as a symbol of the enslavement women have to their children, comparing having baby Rebecca to the early deaths that squashed the literary greatness of the Brontë sisters. (Lucy Silag)

AllVoices posts a poem written by self-styled hockey-mom Sarah Palin adding afterwards:

Hardly Dickinson, Brontë or Plath – in fact its horrific. (catspirit)

We agree wholeheartedly.

The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on going back to Haworth for this year's AGM.

The Squeee reviews Studio One's 1949 Jane Eyre (the one with Charlton Heston as Mr Rochester) and The Harlequin Tea Set discusses Emma Tennant's Adèle (also known as The French Dancer's Bastard).

Categories: Brontë Society, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Theatre