“But being part of this, with the National, really is a dream.”

Birmingham Express & Star features Nadia Clifford, who plays Jane in Sally Cookson's touring adaptation.

It took Nadia Clifford approximately 0.2 seconds to accept her dream role as Jane Eyre. Actually, that’s not true. It took less than that for her to break into a scream after her agent called to say she’d landed the part.
The people she was walking past, in London’s Soho, looked on aghast as she squealed with joy.
“It was after my third audition, I was on my way to meet a friend for lunch, by which point I was emotionally invested in the role and the show.
“My agent called 20 minutes after I left the audition with Sally, the director, and told me. I was in the middle of Soho and I just screamed down the phone. Anyone who was in the vicinity of me for 20 yards must have thought I was a mad woman. I was thrilled.”
Nadia is, of course, anything but mad. An avowed Charlotte Brontë fan, she is quite literally playing her dream role in the National Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre, which runs at Birmingham’s REP from Monday until September 16 as part of a major 21-city tour of the UK. [...]
Nadia had read the novel several times before auditioning for the role. Her first read through was as a 14-year-old, while she immersed herself again at 21 before re-reading it twice for the role.
“It’s a mammoth role and so I wasn’t taking it lightly. I wasn’t allowing myself to fantasise about getting it. It was so beyond the realms of possibility I just didn’t want to make a fool of myself. I was pinching myself when it eventually happened.”
“It’s funny because reading it with the knowledge that I was going to be playing the role meant I read it in a different way to someone just enjoying the work of Charlotte Brontë. What was really amazing when I read it knowing I’d got the role was that it catapulted me back to my teens. I felt a strong sense of identification with a kindred spirit, which so many people feel.
“Jane Eyre is universal at articulating love and anger and jealousy. It’s an enriching experience to read good writing. It makes you feel acknowledged in your own emotional state.”
Nadia says she pours herself into the role: “I think that in order to be authentic with your performance you have to draw on your own emotions and experience. That can be quite a painful thing to do. You are accessing little boxes that are hidden away.
“You can’t splash around in those dark emotions during the normal course of a day without doing some serious damage to your mental health. But I have to access those places and when I am on stage. I still have to draw on personal experience and relationships and events from my life to bring truth and honesty to Jane’s journey.
“OK, so I’m not an orphan and I don’t know what it’s like to be traumatised as a child, like she is in that relationship with Mrs Reid. But I know loneliness and frustration and I know what it is to be overwhelmed by emotions. They are all in Jane’s frame of reference. As an actor, you have a tool box and those are in mine.”
Nadia grew up in Manchester. As a teen, she was a super, uber, ultimate, turbo fan of the Brontë sisters. She wasn’t far from Howarth [sic] and would visit the parsonage where they grew up.
“I am a big fan of all the sisters work and I love period dramas. Howarth [sic] is an amazing place. It’s such an incredible place to be. It’s so isolated and it’s so humming with this energy. It’s so cut off. Knowing how intelligent and analytical all three of the sisters were was very important to me. They had to work hard. Because of their gender, they couldn’t come out and earn a living as novelists. They had nothing like the recognition they had after their lifetime.”
Jane Eyre remains a bona fide classic – as enjoyable for the cast and crew as it is for the audience.
Nadia adds: “It’s a massive rollercoaster. We haven’t had a moment to think. We travel on a Sunday, perform Monday to Saturday with 8 shows a week and each show is three hours. I never leave the stage. But it’s amazing to be involved in this whirlwind that completely swallows up you. I’ve had to forsake everything in my life for now, it’s full on. We have a holiday coming up soon and I am really looking forward to downtime so that I can reboot.
“But being part of this, with the National, really is a dream.” (Andy Richardson)

The Yorkshire Evening Post talks to Rachel Feldberg, director of the Ilkley Literature Festival. She mentions the fact that the Brontë Parsonage is now part of the National Portfolio Organisation.

This year has been a significant one for literature in West Yorkshire – Ilkley has retained its National Portfolio Organisation status with Arts Council England and has been joined by Bradford Literature Festival and the Brontë Parsonage Museum as NPOs. “It is a fantastic move forward,” says Feldberg. “I hope people can see there are really exciting things going on in literature here, fed by the communities we represent but also by the incredibly rich literary heritage of our region.” (Sarah Millican)

The Telegraph and Argus reports that two locally-filmed movies opening today in the UK - The Limehouse Golem and God's Own Country - are expected to 'boost visitors numbers in the district'.

David Wilson, director of Bradford City of Film, said: “Both these films are getting lots of attention - God’s Own Country is Francis Lee’s debut film yet has won so many accolades and been so highly praised - and the knock-on benefit is that Bradford and Yorkshire are talked about in a very positive light. This is great for the region in terms of visitor numbers. We saw it with Sally Wainwright’s Brontë drama, To Walk Invisible; after it was was shown on TV at Christmas visitor numbers soared to Haworth and surrounding areas. [...]" (Emma Clayton)

Coincidentally, The Sydney Morning Herald reviews God's Own Country.

The Yorkshire moors: the phrase conjures sweeping, majestic country where kindly vets minister to calving cows and Cathy and Heathcliff are forever running towards each other under roiling clouds.
"But when I grew up there it was cold, it was wet, it was windy," says filmmaker Francis Lee. "If you were out there, your head was down and your hands were in your pockets and you were going quickly to get inside. You didn't look at it." That view of the moors was never on screen. "It was always the beauty of it. It's so free and amazing and wild!" (Stephanie Bunbury)

The Favourite of the Month for September 2017 on Classic Movie Favorites is Joan Fontaine and we are told that,

Both The Constant Nymph and Jane Eyre are considered to be among the finest films she starred in. (Lynn)

The Irish Times describes the TV show Outlander as

The Time Traveller’s Wife meets Wuthering Heights round the back of Barry Lyndon’s hedge (Jennifer Gannon)

Publishers Weekly looks at next week's new releases in kids' and YA books, such as

The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente. S&S/McElderry, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-4814-7696-6. Valente (Radiance) delivers a linguistically dazzling novel that draws on the Brontë siblings’ real-life childhood writings about Glass Town, an invented land where they escaped the difficulties of their lives.

The Irish Times interviews The Guardian’s Ireland correspondent Henry McDonald:

Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party? Henry Miller for the smutty stories; Christopher Hitchens for the wit and erudition; Charlotte Bronte to clash with Miller and Albert Camus just because such a morally upright figure deserves to be brought back from the dead. (Martin Doyle)

Palm Springs Life features Palm Springs Luxury Hair Salon and owner Barry Nadeau.

Nadeau was endlessly accommodating and kept up a delightful patter as he worked. As he cut, brushing my hair forward and back, and in any number of ways differently than I’ve experienced before, we chatted about Coco Chanel’s cropped do, the Brontë sisters’ novels, and how thankful Barry is to everyone in the desert for making brush a success (he’s booked out three months in advance). We’d only known each other for half an hour, but I felt comfortable in his hands, enough to report that I don’t really care for the Brontës, that I’m a Jane Austen girl. No offense was taken and no jugular was threatened. (Wendy Duren)

Source

The Irish Times describes actress Rooney Mara as 'devouring the works of the Brontë sisters' as a 'youngster'. Writergurlny features Nelly Dean. Coincidentally, The Sisters' Room has a post in Italian on Tabitha Akroyd, a possible basis for the character. Morbo (Spain) recommends Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, which has just been translated into Spanish. The Times Education Supplement wonders whether 'car mechanics really need to study Brontë'. Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two features Anne Brontë. Estante Etérea (in Portuguese) and Nathan Harless vlogs on Wuthering Heights and Monique Lopes (also in Portuguese) does it about Jane Eyre.