Honouring the text

Berkeleyside is looking forward to the local premiere of Emma Rice's Wuthering Heights in a couple of weeks.

Wuthering Heights, the latest theatrical experience from Emma Rice and her new company, Wise Children, received glowing reviews from audiences and critics alike in England and New York. It arrives at Berkeley Rep Nov. 18, continuing the theater’s tradition of offering audiences decidedly different holiday fare. [...]

“My friends in Berkeley will love this elemental and emotional retelling” of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Rice said. “It’s packed full of my signature humor, music and theatrical magic — but it also bristles with hidden rage.”

The Victorian-era novel centers on the passionate, ill-fated and death-transcending romance between Heathcliff, orphaned as a child on the streets of Liverpool, and Catherine, whose upper-class father took Heathcliff in. When Rice re-read the novel in 2016, she saw in the story themes of female repression, mental health and even the refugee crises. She found it “a cautionary tale about what happens if you do not treat others, and certainly the most vulnerable, with kindness and care.” It was also important to her that the show end on a hopeful note.

In her Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff are like rock stars, “destructive, wild and their internal rage is flipped out.” The music ranges from modern British folk to pure punk. Actors/dancers embody the windy Yorkshire moors, creating a chorus that guides the characters. The scenic design juxtaposes natural  elements like trees and brambles with video that conveys the vastness of the landscape. Nearly all of the scenic pieces and costumes are reclaimed and repurposed because, “It’s a book about the environment. We decided we wanted to be environmentally conscious.”

If you don’t know Brontë, don’t worry. You’ll be fine. “I think we’ve done quite a good job of making it very fresh, very accessible, but also really honoring the text,” Rice said.

Now reviews Ann-Marie MacDonald's novel Fayne.

Fayne, award-winning author, playwright, actor, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights activist Ann-Marie MacDonald’s fourth novel, is a deeply immersive Victorian gothic tale set in the borderlands of Scotland and England. It’s an inheritor of the Brontë sisters’ atmospheric books, both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and also of Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid Orlando.

In a “Dear Reader” address before the story begins, MacDonald explains, “It began the way all my books and plays have, with an image. This time, it was of a mysterious brooding landscape: a windswept moor… Then I drew a picture – literally… a young person in romantic nineteenth-century garb. I couldn’t tell if it was a young man or a young woman. Then I wrote down a caption: ‘I had heard something out on the fen.’”

That early vision was followed by many months of research at Montreal’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine, where she was drawn to the implements and methods of 19th-century gynecology, a profession and its details essential to her central characters. Stomping about on the rugged Scottish moorland in the care of a local guide who guarded her footsteps also fed MacDonald’s lush imagination, right down to the coconut scent of the plentiful sun-coloured gorse that lifts from the pages. 

This captivating coming-of-age story of the fiery, insatiably curious adolescent protagonist Charlotte Bell – surely an amalgam of Charlotte Brontë and her male nom de plume Currer Bell – has the narrative drive of a thriller at the heart of which lie closely guarded family secrets. Charlotte, herself an enigma, justifies her isolation on the family estate (the titular Fayne) in the company of her loving widowed father Lord Henry and their servants by what she’s been told: “I understood my Condition thus: I was morbidly susceptible to germs.”  (Janet Somerville)

The Boston Globe features this year's Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair.

The Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair returns this weekend for its 44th year, bringing over 100 exhibitors and sellers from around the world presenting all manner of biblio-treasure and ephemera. Delights on offer this year: rare first editions of James Joyce’s riotous, rollicking, notoriously challenging “Finnegans Wake,” as well as Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”; (Nina MacLaughlin)

Journalist Richard Benson discusses his Yorkshire accent in The Telegraph.

My parents had strong accents; “thee”, “thy” and “thou”, “watter” for water, “sewer” for sore. When I left home my mum told me earnestly that I’d have to talk posher. I said I wouldn’t but, of course, after a while you get a bit fed up of your tutor telling you that the way you say Wuthering Heights is “sweet”. You end up rounding off consonants and tidying up your grammar and you’ve become one of those people – ie everyone – who speaks a bit posher at work and a bit more “common” at home.

Popular Science looks into Google's AI Wordcraft.

Daphne Ippolito, one of the researchers on the Wordcraft team, suggested that adding parameter efficient tuning, which they can customize and implement on top of their current model, could potentially help them generate different writing styles, like Shakespeare. But whether it can clearly mock up the subtle style differences between two Victorian-era writers, like Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, is a question for further exploration. (Interestingly enough, Ippolito has worked on a separate project called Real or Fake text, which asks users to distinguish between AI versus human writing for recipes, news articles, and short stories.)  (Charlotte Hu)

La voz de Galicia (Spain) features Spanish booktubers focused on the classics.