More on Patti Smith's visit to Haworth in
The Telegraph and Argus:
Patti, who played a gig for the Brontë Society on Friday in the Brontë Schoolroom, toured the Parsonage Museum, where the family used to live, for Radio 4’s Today show.
During the programme, broadcast on Saturday, she said: “Most of the Brontës passed away here, they did their work here, wrote master pieces here and experienced so much beauty and tragedy here, it’s quite moving.” Patti, from New York, said the literary Brontës were powerful story-tellers whose work she had been introduced to by her sister, Linda. She said her and her sister were both big fans of the Brontës’ work and would read and discuss the books in great detail and phone each other daily to talk about them after Patti moved away when she married.
Patti was in Haworth with her sister on a trip she described as a “pilgrimage”.
She said: “I promised my sister that when she turned 65 I would bring her here and so I planned this little trip and we’re going to end it in Scarborough on Charlotte’s birthday, which is on April 21, and go to visit Anne’s grave.”
She said she was overjoyed by the visit.
Gypsy Death And You writes about attending the performance at the Old Schoolroom and meeting Patti Smith herself.
The
Hull Daily Mail features Hull Truck Theatre and their last
Jane Eyre performances.
It's one of the best known lines in English literature: "Reader, I married him."
The closing words of Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë's celebrated novel – bring to an end the heroine's search for love and acceptance.
But in Laura Turner's new stage adaptation they are the first words uttered.
Staged as a "memory play", Laura's adaptation sees Jane looking back at the choices she made in life.
"In the novel you see Jane at all these different ages, from childhood to adulthood," said Laura, a Lincoln playwright.
"I know, from others I have spoken to, that many people think that those early years – that sense of her growing up – are among the most beautiful parts of the novel.
"With an adult actress in the role, the best way to convey that is to have her talking very passionately about those times in her life.
"By staging it as a memory play you get that retrospective – in your early twenties you look back at decisions you made in your life and question whether they were right."
Laura's adaptation, which has completed a nationwide tour, sees three actors playing 15 roles.
Simply staged, the production's emphasis is on getting "inside" Jane's thoughts. The drama follows Jane looking back on her life, including her meeting with her future husband Mr Rochester – the master of the hall where she works as a governess.
"With it being a memory play it is about the powers of imagination and the actors, with the audience, conjuring up this world," Laura said.
"We describe it as a play within a play. It leant itself to a three-hander because of the story-telling elements we wanted to put across.
"We wanted that interaction between the cast and the audience, so they feel more engaged with it." [...]
For Laura, Truck's tour of Jane Eyre has allowed her to explore one of her best-loved books.
"It has all these different elements to it," she said.
"Jane Eyre is a love story but it is also a really intriguing novel, with these gothic aspects – and it is something about the way these elements come together that make it so intriguing.
"As a young, female writer, it is exciting to have such a passionate narrative voice in there from Jane." (Will Ramsey)
Not leaving the stage just yet, as
STV Glasgow features
Peter McMaster's Wuthering Heights.
There's cruelty, malice, resentment and passion in Emily Brontë's 160-year-old text which has been reinterpreted on stage, on film and television countless times.
But a Glasgow theatre maker is using Wuthering Heights as the basis to explore the themes of gender and masculinity by putting on an all male production of the classic tale. [...]
Peter explained: “From the outside from an audience's perspective it's not changed too much since Arches Live, the biggest difference is our understanding of the work. I took the guys away on a retreat to look into the emotional side of the journey.
“I think I would find it really hard if we were trying to condense the text into an hour show, it's more responding to the story rather than trying to recreate it.
“There's not too many references to a particular time period, there's five men they all wear a suit and they all take on the part of Heathcliff at some stage or other.
"The process in which we were working was in a safe place, it was very relaxed. We're definitely not pretending to be women and we're not in drag because we're not drag artists, it's the simple formula of men in a dress, and it's quite fun to wear a dress so why should we not do it.” [...]
The idea to develop an all-male production of Wuthering Heights emerged when Peter set up a men's group in Glasgow, and after buying a copy of the book when he was travelling in India he recognised the potential to rework it in a way that would explore masculinity.
Peter added: “If I'm honest winning the award was a relief, I felt like Wuthering Heights was something that deserved to be shown to a wider audience and developed. For me, I've been working as a performance maker for the last five years but this is something that does provide me with a platform to experiment.
"When I went into the bar after Arches Live the atmosphere was electric, lots of folk were wanting to talk about it. At times it's fun and there's high drama and we explore a range of emotions." (Gillian Provan)
The
Yorkshire Post has an article on Jamie Roberts. Who is he?
It all starts way back with Sir James Roberts, Jamie’s great great grandfather. James was the uneducated son of a poor weaver, one of 18 children, who without any of life’s advantages (apart presumably from force of personality, natural intelligence and shrewdness) became a self-made industrialist, a philanthropist and finally a baronet.
This one-time boy mill hand worked his way up until he was in a position to take over one of the powerhouses of Yorkshire textiles, the palace of industry that was Salts Mill at Saltaire.
Sir Titus Salt had built his fortune here on the back of alpacas. For Sir James, the fibre of choice came from angora goats.
He extended the scale of Saltaire manufacturing by building the adjacent New Mill, prospered further and devised a family crest appropriate for a baronet. It featured an angora.
When Sir James’s upward climb faltered for a time, he was led, by an unlikely set of circumstances, to a business encounter with a bank official who just happened to be getting started as the greatest poet of the 20th-century, TS Eliot. (...)
The family were convinced that the man in the silk headgear was Sir James. “One of my cousins sent a letter to Valerie, Eliot’s widow,” says Jamie. “She confirmed that the Bradford millionaire was Sir James. She remembered Eliot coming home and discussing his encounter at the bank.”
Sir James had other serious literary credits. As a lad he had met Charlotte Brontë and in later life he purchased her home, Haworth Parsonage, and gave it to the Bronte Society. (Michael Hickling)
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