'You can picture the Brontës and Wuthering Heights'

Morning Star gives 4 out of 5 stars to Wise Children's Wuthering Heights.

Rice and her company Wise Children’s Wuthering Heights is a marvel of ensemble playing, where actors, on-stage musicians, Ian Ross’s music and Vicki Mortimer’s set (an installation of moving parts) are in high-energy harmony.

Rice replaces Brontë’s servant narrator, Nelly, with a personified moor, a troupe acting, dancing and singing like a Greek chorus as they unspool the tragedies of the Earnshaws and the Lintons.

The Leader of The Moor (a terrific Nandi Bhebhe) in a hat of ferns, sticks and feathers, calls on the audience to “Concentrate…no-one said this was going to be easy.” And so the complications of family ties are dealt with at the beginning, as a performed family tree.

“Real” trees are stacks of chairs, dogs are snapping jawbones on scythes, and birds flapping pages of books held aloft on poles - all against gently moving film of grey Yorkshire clouded sky.

The Moor (mother nature) befriends and tries to advise the human characters, offering emotional support – as when Cathy’s brother Hindley hits the bottle after his wife Frances dies in childbirth. They are almost singing a twelve-step programme – one sip and into the abyss. Off into the chaos...

Death abounds, whether through childbirth, alcoholism or plain despair, each death accompanied by a doctor, played with bleak humour by Craig Johnson. Each is named and chalked up on a blackboard and paraded across the stage.

Sam Archer as Mr Lockwood, the character opening and closing the story, and as Edgar Linton gives us terrific character acting. He’s very funny.

Lucy McCormick is sensationally powerful as Cathy — a wide-eyed tousle-haired girl lost in a world of love and eroticism beyond her understanding, and in the second half, the haunting presence of a blonde Goth.

The usual adjective for Heathcliff is brooding, but Ash Hunter, superb in the role, loves, hates, is clever and cruel, revengeful and despairing in equal measure. He also sings mightily – as does Cathy when she grabs a microphone and wails like a banshee, wind machine throwing her hair back. For these are the altered states of intense emotion.

Children are represented as puppets, which works well. We flinch no less when young Hindley strikes the puppet child Heathcliff across the face in a jealous rage.

A few scenes dragged, and less of the comic talent of Katy Owen as Isabella Linton and little Linton would have improved the comedy.

Tama Phethean as Hindley Earnshaw, and later as his son, a rough and needy Hareton trying to learn his letters, is excellent, picking up an earlier theme of the importance of education. Cathy had rebuked Heathcliff for his illiteracy, giving Linton as much of an edge as his nice house.

Hareton becomes the redemptive hero, as the destroyed man is restored to inner life by Cathy and Linton’s daughter, Cathie [sic] (Witney White), whose caring father Edgar has made her less fucked up than the others. [...]

Special mentions too for — Movement Designer Etta Murfitt. This is fine physical theatre that neither hides its theatricality nor lets it get in the way. (Jan Woolf)

While Broadway World has announced its shortlist for the 2021 BroadwayWorld UK Awards and...

Best Leading Performer in a New Production of a Play

Clare Perkins, The Wife of Willesden, Kiln Theatre

Cush Jumbo, Hamlet, Young Vic

David Harewood, Best of Enemies, Young Vic

Emma Corrin, Anna X, Harold Pinter Theatre

Hadley Fraser, 2:22 - A Ghost Story, Nöel Coward Theatre

Ian Shaw, The Shark Is Broken, Ambassadors Theatre

Jack Holden, Cruise, Duchess Theatre

James McAvoy, Cyrano de Bergerac, Playhouse Theatre/Harold Pinter Theatre

Linda Bassett, What If If Only, Royal Court

Lucy McCormick, Wuthering Heights, Bristol Old Vic/National Theatre

Patsy Ferran, Camp Siegfried, Old Vic

Ralph Fiennes, Four Quartets, UK Tour/Harold Pinter Theatre (Marianka Swain)

Classical Music reports that

For one tiny record label in rural Scotland, the intersection between music and storytelling has provided an opportunity. ‘Soundtracks for books on tapes – that’s what we do. That’s it really. There’s no grand scheme or marketing ploy. It does what it says on the tin.’ That’s Stuart McLean, the founder of Bibliotapes, a project which commissions composers to write new scores to classic novels. Each soundtrack is released on cassette, packaged in the style of a 1960s Pelican paperback. Despite having no website, glossy PR campaign or highly curated Instagram account, the label now has a cult following, with every limited run of cassettes selling out within just a few days. [...]

With Amazon’s introduction of 3D spatial audio in its podcast and audiobook offerings, listeners are expecting more from their stories. ‘Younger listeners have almost come to expect a soundtrack,’ says Cameron. ‘They have multidimensional media habits.’ Whether it’s offered to the listener as an ambient backdrop to an audiobook or as a standalone soundtrack, delivered to your door on a limited-edition cassette, music is transforming the experience of reading novels. Just as we all know John Williams’s two-note motif for Jaws, perhaps one day we’ll all sing along to the theme tunes for Wuthering Heights and To Kill a Mockingbird. (Freya Parr)

This vindicating article from Mustang News has such a promising beginning that the blunder towards the end is quite a blow.

Virginia Woolf, Silvia Plath, The Brontë Sisters and Emily Dickison — hopefully you’ve heard of them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t read any of their works. It’s saddening to see such beautiful storytelling pushed into the narrow label of “feminist novels” or “women writers” that are then only covered in niche English classes. [...]

Instead of accepting the dismal idea that it may take a long time for the American education system to realize that it is incredibly important for everyone to read books written by women, about women who are strong, weak, depressed, lost, determined, frustrated or the happiest they have ever been, you should take matters into your own hands and read the following: [...]

“Jane Eyre” by Emily Brontë: Brontë appeals to one of the most fundamental human needs in this novel: to be loved. She questions the meaning of this need and dives deeper into human emotion. (Zoe Denton)

It also says Mrs 'Dolloway".

The Guardian features Yorkshire farmer Rachel Hallos.

Most days it is not until 7.45am that you’ll find Rachel Hallos swinging open the door of Beeston Hall Farm in Ripponden, Yorkshire. Beeston Hall is a hill farm overlooking Baitings reservoir, which lies in the valley of the River Ryburn. The 800-hectare (2,000-acre) farm consists of steep fields demarcated by dry stone walls that crumble in a squall. The hill is crested by heather-covered moorland that turns purple in summer and copper in autumn. Hallos lives in a traditional Pennines farmhouse made out of handsome slabs of grey Yorkshire gritstone. A Brontë house, for Brontë country. (Sirin Kale)

Great British Life asks TV presenter Jane McDonald about all things Yorkshire.

A Yorkshire view that inspires 

Definitely standing at the top of Haworth and looking down the old main cobbled street, and then you walk two minutes and you’re on the moors and it’s just wow, beautiful. You can picture the Brontës and Wuthering Heights. It’s gorgeous. And I love that Haworth has still got the high street with little boutique shops on it. That’s really rare these days. (Kathryn Armstrong)

El Español (Spain) point to a few 19th-century writers who supposedly didn't pay much attention to God.

Los novelistas del XIX obraron de forma similar. Flaubert, Stendhal o las hermanas Brontë fijaron su mirada en los asuntos terrenales, analizando las pasiones que unen y separan a los sexos. El amor colonizó la novela, exhibiendo sus obsesiones, frustraciones y temores. El romanticismo, una forma de neurosis, postergó a la metafísica, rebajada a mera arqueología. (Rafael Narbona) (Translation)

Abruzzo Live (Italy) has an article on Emily Brontë, so-called 'visionary and anarchic genius'.

Emily passa le sue giornate dedicandosi agli animali, alla natura e ad Anne, la sorella più fragile, ma è nella scrittura che viene fuori la sua vera anima: selvatica, poetica, intensa, rabbiosa. Il suo mondo narrativo rompe gli schemi, trasforma la letteratura del tempo, squassa e innova. (Roberta Di Pascasio) (Translation)

Finally, The Hollywood Reporter thinks that the film Emily may be going to Cannes (which would be only right after coming out of it).

Organizers are currently gearing up for an in-person event May 17-28, an edition of the French festival that much of the industry is hoping will be the first grand and truly global movie get-together in more than two years. [...]

While it’ll likely be at a month or two before any official announcements are made, The Hollywood Reporter has put together an entirely theoretical lineup of films that could be in contention for an official selection slot. [...]

EMILY — Frances O’Connor

Sex Education star Emma Mackie was one of the standouts in Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, Death on the Nile, and could mark her Cannes debut as Emily Bronte in this biopic of the British author. Dunkirk breakout Fionn Whitehead — last at the festival with 2019’s Port Authority — also stars. (Alex Ritman)