Villette Re-imagined in Leeds

The West Yorkshire Playhouse Brontë season continues with a very singular new adaptation of Villette:

Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
Re-imagined by Linda Marshall-Griffiths
September 24th to October 15th (Post Show Discussion Wed 5 Oct)
Courtyard Theatre
Leeds

Lucy Snowe, alone and abandoned, boards a boat in search of purpose.
Arriving at an archaeological site digging for the remains of the elusive Lady of Villette, she works alongside the beautiful Gin, the prying Beck, the charming Dr John and the remote Professor Paul, though Lucy remains an outsider.
Absorbed in her work to find a cure for the next pandemic to secure humanity’s future, can she open herself up to the possibility of love and put the bones of the past behind her?
On the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, West Yorkshire Playhouse celebrates her unique genius with a daring new adaptation by a fellow Yorkshire writer, Linda Marshall-Griffiths. With echoes of the illness and loss that wracked Brontë’s own life, both novel and play explore the redemptive power of love and the uncertainty of holding on to it.

EDIT: The Ilkley Gazette adds:

A Playhouse spokesman said many people considered Villette to be better, more ambitious and complex than Charlotte’s more famous novel Jane Eyre.
Linda Marshall Griffiths has approached’ novel from a 21st century perspective, focusing on around Lucy Snowe, a brilliant virologist who could play a crucial role in finding a cure for a pandemic virus but is plagued by her a past which torments her at every turn.
As the urgency and burden of her work grow greater, she grapples with the promise and possibility of love and the fear of losing it.
Director Mark Rosenblatt said: ‘This re-imagining of Villette gets to the heart of the original novel but finds a way to connect it with a modern audience.
“It relocates and updates the action to a near-future world, placing Lucy in a position of isolation and distance as the last survivor of her kind - as Charlotte Brontë was the last of her siblings when she wrote Villette.” (David Knights)