We Are Three Sisters reviewed

The first reviews of Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters are beginning to come in. The Guardian gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

Unlike Alan Ayckbourn's recent Vanya-derivative Dear Uncle, Morrison's play is not a direct transposition; none of Chekhov's characters are genius novelists, of course; nor does Emily acquire a dotard husband and a philosophical admirer to more closely resemble the original middle sister, Masha. But the general contour is superimposed on the Yorkshire landscape with remarkable ease, and the similarities are striking: the sisters' work ethic, their stoic resignation to provincial life, and – above all – the disruptive effect of a ne'er-do-well brother.
Morrison seizes upon the factual quirk that Branwell Brontë had a fling with a married woman several years his senior, who really was called Mrs Robinson, echoing the 1967 movie The Graduate. Becky Hindley's hilariously vulgar portrayal of Robinson perfectly mirrors the bossy intrusion of Chekhov's cuckoo-in-the-nest Natasha, while Gareth Cassidy's Branwell could easily be Chekhov's Andrei, but with a bigger drink problem.
Morrison pinpoints the morbid aspect of literally being surrounded by death: "We're like weeds in a kitchen garden – when we step outside it's not cobbles we walk on, but graves." Yet Barrie Rutter's production captures the robust humour of three strong-willed Yorkshire women not unaware of the irony of being half in love with misery. "Gloom bucks me up," announces Sophia di Martino as Emily. "There's nothing more cheering than a tale of woe." (Alfred Hickling)

The Telegraph also gives 4 out of 5 stars:

The wonder of the evening, produced for touring by Northern Broadsides, is that it never feels merely like a clever exercise. You can watch it absorbed in its well-researched evocation of the Brontë household circa 1848 while appreciating the act of homage – the cunning nods to the original and uncanny correspondences Morrison achieves.
Of course, sleights of hand have been required to shoehorn life into art. Some of the differences are striking. In the gloomy Brontë parsonage, around which the wind almost perpetually howls, the father of the household is very much alive, if sweetly frail in Duggie Brown’s performance, as he is not in the original.
The lovesick major – Vershinin – has become an unnamed lovesick curate, while Baron Tuzenbach is translated into a touchingly tragicomic local doctor. Barry Rutter, who directs, pops up as a bumptious teacher but has no claim over the disconsolate Emily (Masha to Charlotte and Anne’s Olga and Irina).
The sisters pine for London, not Moscow – but the means to reach the capital lies within their grasp with the publication under their male pseudonyms of their first novels.
The essential spirit, though, of philosophising frustration and melancholy yearning is kept beautifully intact, and speaks absolutely to the constrained world the Brontës inhabited, likened by Emily to “living inside a coffin”.
If anything, that atmosphere is sharpened by the tyrannical hold exerted over their wellbeing by their drunk, disorderly and disastrously matched brother Branwell (who makes one think about the puppyish, hapless Andrey in the Chekhov in a new, invigorating light). (Dominic Cavendish)

The Stage reviews it as well:

Charlotte (Catherine Kinsella), Emily (Sophia Di Martino) and Anne (Rebecca Hutchinson) are played with detail and depth, both individually and as a trio. Di Martino’s performance is especially satisfying, given the elusive nature of her character.
Gareth Cassidy’s portrayal of the ne’er-do-well Branwell is etched with despair. Mrs Robinson, the older woman he loves, arrives unexpectedly (yes Mrs Robinson, you really couldn’t make it up). She is played intentionally jarringly, but a little too much so, by Becky Hindley.
At the parsonage there are men to distract, but they are a rum collection. The sisters busy themselves with their secret lives and a trip to London is planned.
Morrison’s play is much more than an interesting dramatic exercise. Despite its use of poetic licence, it goes some way to setting right the many myths and easy answers that seem to have grown round the Bronte family. Above all, with its honest and vigorous humour, it banishes the gloom. (Kevin Berry)

Richard Wilcocks reviews the production from a Brontë point of view on the Brontë Parsonage Blog.

The New Zealand Herald reviews Jane Eyre 2011 and gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

Muted colours, natural lighting and misty moors fill director Cary Fukunaga's moody Jane Eyre, yet another screen adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 gothic romance. Complemented by a standout performance from Australian actress Mia Wasikowska and a clever story structure, Fukunaga has created a fresh and satisfying adaptation of the classic tale.
Successfully condensing Brontë's novel into two hours is a difficult task (18 feature film versions have already tried), but screenwriter Moira Buffini (Tamara Drewe) does an admirable job of rearranging the narrative to retain all the distinct stages of Jane's story and, more than likely, still keep fans of the novel happy. [...]
Fukunaga's adaptation is beautifully crafted. Using only candles, fire and lanterns to light interior scenes, he brings a wonderful sense of authenticity to the 19th century setting. It also goes some way to making the prose sound appropriate rather than old-fashioned.
No doubt die-hard Brontë fans will find issues that niggle but, for most of us, Fukunaga's spooky, moving and brooding adaptation is a reminder of why we enjoyed the book in the first place. (Francesca Rudkin)

The Times has received a Letter to the Editor concerning this film:

Sir,
Why do successive film directors wilfully misdate the action of Jane Eyre? In 1996 Franco Zeffirelli showed us a tombstone which declared that Helen Burns lived from 1821 to 1834 and told us that Rochester married Bertha Mason in 1829 — thus postponing the drama enacted 15 years later in Thornfield Hall to Victoria’s reign. Then the justly admired BBC version of 2006 gave the year of that marriage as 1825. Now we learn that in the present release (review, Sept 9), which is drawing crowds to our cinemas, Cary Fukunaga “settled on 1843” as the operative year for the unfolding of his film, only four years before the publication of the book. But Charlotte Brontë has given us a precise and pivotal clue to the timing of the events imagined in her novel. In Chapter 32 St John Rivers brings Jane “a new publication” which turns out to be Marmion, proving that her passionate employment by Rochester falls between the Battle of Trafalgar and 1808, when Scott’s poem was published. Hence the accurate reference in Chapter 11 to George III and “the Prince of Wales” (not yet Regent). Although it was written in Victorian England, Jane Eyre is not about the England of Victoria.
Emeritus Professor Philip McNair Much Hadham, Herts

Well, we don't mean to correct an Emeritus Professor but we would like to point out that the dating of Jane Eyre is not as straightforward as that. Quoting from John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?

But in the novel dates are a minefield. The editor who has looked into them most clearly, Michael Mason, identifies two conflicting pieces of dating evidence. When she came over from France (a few months before Jane's arrival at Thornfield, p. 106), Adela recalls 'a great ship with a chimney that smoked—how it did smoke!' Steamdriven vessels were plying up and down the eastern coast of Britain as early as 1821. Scott travelled down by one 'the Edinburgh') to the coronation in 1821. Like Adela, he found the vessel exceptionally smoky and he nicknamed it the 'New Reekie'. Cross-channel steam services seem to have started later in the 1820s. If steam-driven ships are momentarily glimpsed (or smelled) in Jane Eyre, steam-engined trains are wholly absent. This is the prelapsarian world of the stage coach. [...]
The clearest but most perplexing date-marker occurs late in the narrative when Jane is with St John Rivers at Morton School. On 5 November (an anti-Papist holiday) St John brings Jane 'a book for evening solace'. It is 'a poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days—the golden age of modern literature. Alas! the readers of our era are less favoured . . . While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of Charlotte Brontë Marmion (for Marmion it was), St John stooped to examine my drawing* (p. 390). Scott's long narrative poem Marmion was published in late February 1808 as a luxurious quarto, costing a guinea and a half. The month doesn't fit, although the year might be thought to chime with the earlier 'Prince of Wales' reference. But 1808 makes nonsense of critical elements in the characters' prehistories. It would give Jane, for instance, a birth-date of 1777. It would mean that Rochester impregnated Céline with Adela (if he is indeed the little girl's father) around 1799. We would have to picture him, an Englishman, gallivanting round France during the Napoleonic Wars, crossing paths with the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sidney Carton. Those wars would still be going on in the background of the main action of Jane Eyre. Sea-going steamers aside, Charlotte Brontë's novel does not 'feel' as if it is taking place in the first decade of the nineteenth century. There are numerous incidental allusions which place it at least a couple of decades later.
What seems most likely is that the 'new publication' of Marmion is the 'Magnum Opus' edition of 1834. This cheap edition (which came out with Scott's collected works) was hugely popular, and cost 6 shillings—more appropriate to the frugal pocket of St John Rivers than the de luxe version of 1808. It is quite possible that what Brontë is recalling in this little digression is the excitement which the purchase of the same, Magnum Opus, volume excited at Haworth Parsonage when she was 19.
A 'best date' for the main action of Jane Eyre would be the early to mid-1830s—a year or two before the critical date of 1835, which may be seen as foreshadowing but not as yet clearly defining the grounds for, divorce or annulment. This historical setting would not exonerate Rochester's intended bigamy, but in the legally blurred context of pre-1835 it would not be as deliberately felonious an act as it would be in the film's [Jane Eyre 1944] 1839.

It must have been in a recent review of this film that Philip Hensher from The Telegraph has found the word 'iconic' applied to Charlotte Brontë:

Few labels are so recklessly applied as the word “iconic”. A search through one national newspaper’s weekly output sees, in the past seven days, the word applied to a fly-half called Dan Carter, the pop-artist Richard Hamilton, a photograph of Bloody Sunday, the Ark Royal, the World Trade Centre, Greenwich Park, Walt Disney’s signature, Neneh Cherry, Captain Cook’s boomerang, Battersea Power Station, several sports stadiums, Le Pin wine, Charlotte Brontë, a talk-show host called Keith Olbermann and Roald Dahl’s shed.

The Indian Express interviews Brontëite Sonam Kapoor:

Do you think the young audience would buy into an old-fashioned,
romantic version of romance?
Yes. People still want that. In our life we want escape. We believe in escapist cinema. That’s why classic cinema is classic, no? What happened in Jane Eyre might not happen now but you still want to watch it. The love story in any of the Brontë sisters’ works might not happen in this day and age but you still remember that love story.

Another Brontëite is Barbara Taylor Bradford as shown by this interview from The JC:

Bradford had her sights set on being a writer from her early days as an only child in Leeds and became a great fan of the local literary heroes, the Brontës. (Gerald Jacobs)

Interviewed by The L Magazine, writer Helen Benedict has great advice for its readers:

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers' lives for the better?
Every person is different, so no one thing can change everyone. Jane might be changed by listening to a recent wonderful story I heard on NPR about the teenaged daughter of a firefighter wounded in the World Trade Center attacks. Joe might be changed by picking up Jane Eyre for the first time in his life and realizing it’s not chick lit but a brilliant novel, way ahead of its time. Re-reading great books, like Middlemarch or War and Peace, is one of the ways to see how much you’ve changed and matured since you last read it. (Mark Asch)

The Bath Chronicle talks to Lauren Nixon, author of Jane Austen: A Celebration of her Life and Work and mentions that

Miss Nixon hopes to start a PhD next year on Jane Austen and is going to do some work on the Brontës for her publisher Worth Press.

Associated Content has a review of Jane Eyre 2011 and Semi-fictional and …or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love to Blog also review the film.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Theatre