Events all over

Starting today, September 15, there are several Brontë alerts all around:

1. New dates for the Withering Looks tour of the LipService Theater company:

Greenwich Theatre,15th – 17th September

Liverpool, Unity Theatre, 21st – 22nd October

Hereford, Courtyard Theatre, 26th October

Portsmouth New Theatre Royal, 27th October 

Hull Truck Theatre, 30th November – 3rd December

Radlett, The Radlett Centre, 28th January

2.  In Rochester, NY, a new production of William Luce's Brontë,with Meredith Powell.

John W. Borek Presents
William Luce’s Brontë
with Meredith Powell
Directed by Michael H. Arve
MuCCC, Rochester, NY

Meredith Powell of Irondequoit, NY is Charlotte Brontë the most dominant and ambitious of the Brontës. In this play by William Luce, the author of The Belle of Amherst, we meet Charlotte just as she is returning from London following success of her most famous novel, Jane Eyre.

September 15,16,17 @7:30 PM September 18 @2:00PM

EDIT: Messenger Post adds:

[Meredith] Powell says that even though a one-person play means a lot more memorizing, it can be very powerful for the audience.
“The audience is fully engaged, and becomes a part of the play,” she said. “It’s just you and the audience.”
“Brontë” was initially set to begin next year, but after “PS Your Cat is Dead” at MuCCC was canceled, Arve presented the one-person play to Powell, who only had four weeks to rehearse.
“She’s a wonderful actress, very meticulous in her choices of who to play,” [Michael H.] Arve said.
Much of what Powell researched was through Brontë’s published works. Like Jane Eyre, Brontë had a difficult life. And like Eyre, Bronte was strong and overcame setbacks in life. (...)
Powell said the use of costume, setting, script and even her grandparents helped her portray the time period.
“I remember my grandmother making a big deal about saying, ‘It’s not sweating; it’s perspiring,’ or ‘It’s not a leg; it’s a limb,’” Powell said. (...)
“Authors write what they know, and there’re remnants of Jane Eyre in Brontë,” Arve said. “I really hope this gives readers a taste of Brontë, and take away a love for the character as I do,” Arve said. (Nora Hicks)

3. A talk at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New York (Butler Library)

September 15, 2011 (Thursday)
Barbara Heritage
Assistant Director & Curator of Collections, Rare Book School,
University of Virginia

Brontë and the Bookmakers: The Rise and Reception of Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë’s initial impulse was to make manuscript books that were eccentric, private affairs but also intertextual experiments that imitated the styles of a wide range of printed materials. Brontë was later forced to modify her writing—both in form and content—to meet the demands of the publishing marketplace. In this talk, Heritage will argue that, in responding to these pressures, Brontë developed and employed a sometimes defensive rhetoric that, upon inspection, reveals the limitations of marketing visual, written, and printed artifacts to nineteenth-century audiences. This method of analysis informs our understanding both of Brontë's development as an author and of the language of her first published novel, Jane Eyre.

EDIT: 4. A talk by Moira Buffini in London:

BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters' Lecture Series
Moira Buffini
Friday 16 September, 18:30 / BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly
Best known until recently as a writer for theatre, Buffini has established herself a playwright whose ambitious and confident vision refuses to be restricted by the confines of current theatre conventions. She is a founding member of the Monsterists, a group which advocates large scale productions (despite the prevailing notion that the theatre can no longer resource such storytelling). She is already bringing this same attitude to her screenwriting and has entered the sector with a bang. Her skill at handling multi-character and mutli-stranded stories made her the perfect choice for adapting comic strip Tamara Drewe for the screen (directed by Stephen Frears). Her adaptation of Jane Eyre (directed by Sin Nombre’s Cary Fukunaga) is released in September 2011 and her reworking of her own play, Byzantium to be directed by Neil Jordan and starring Soairse Ronan.

Categories: Humour, Talks, Theatre