We have come across a couple of reviews of Remy Bumppo's Brontë. Before reading them, don't forget that you can see for yourself by clicking here and profiting from a 2x1 promotion.Here is the family profile: Three desperately unhappy and bookish sisters, one self-destructive brother and their rather distracted preacher father, all living far from the big city that might have given the women access to at least some possibility for success and happiness.Chekhov does have a play called Three Sisters, though it's totally unrelated to our three sisters. And what a weird parenthesis that is for Anne. Not only does it make her a vague kind of novelist but also the only poet in the family.
The plot of a Chekhov play? Could be, but as it happens, it is the story of those real-life Bronte girls -- Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre), Emily (author of Wuthering Heights) and Anne (poet and novelist) -- who lived their rather short but agonized lives in an isolated West Yorkshire parsonage, not far from the grim realities of a mill town. And all this is the stuff from which British playwright Polly Teale has crafted her play "Bronte," now receiving its U.S. premiere by the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. (Hedy Weiss)
The thrust of Teale's literate, if at times sluggish play is just how the Bronte sisters (Victorian era spinsters, though Charlotte would marry in her late 30s and die soon after in childbirth) were warped by their society and how, for better and for worse, they funneled all their repressed passion, energy and dreams of immortality into their writing. (Hedy Weiss)Charlotte died most probably in the early stages of pregnancy. I wonder, if you're going to see a play on the Brontë sisters, couldn't you at the very least read the Wikipedia articles on them?
The sisters' distinct personalities are clearly limned in director James Bohnen's well-cast production. Charlotte (Susan Shunk, prim yet commanding) is the oldest and mostly overtly ambitious. She enjoys considerable celebrity for Jane Eyre and in many ways dictates the legacies of her sisters. (Shunk also does a fine job with the show's funniest scene -- Charlotte's hilarious acceptance of a marriage proposal.)Well, she dies after Emily.
Emily (played beautifully by Carrie A. Coon) is the genuine neurotic -- the one with the most keenly developed erotic imagination and a terror of the outside world. And Anne (the gentle Rachel Sondag) is the youngest and least formed. She dies early. (Hedy Weiss)
The sisters' spoiled, dissipated brother Branwell (Gregory Anderson is picture perfect) has all the advantages, plus the easy encouragement of his father (Patrick Clear, just right in this role and several others). But he lacks his sisters' talent and quickly sinks into alcoholism and debauchery.And from the Chicago Tribune:
Linda Gillum gives her all as the fictional characters (mad wives and spurned lovers) who animate the Brontes' best-known books, but this device verges perilously on parody. (Hedy Weiss)
In the opening frame of Polly Teale's self-aware dramatic exploration of the sisters Bronte, the dramatist poses a compelling question: How did these three Yorkshire spinsters — women who apparently never had sex or even been passionately kissed — set the world ablaze with the likes of "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights"?Categories: Theatre
Genius in triplicate? Proto-feminist frustration? Something to do with their complex father or profligate brother? Or was it just the moody atmospherics of the isolated Yorkshire moors?
As anyone who has made the pilgrimage to the village of Haworth well knows, Charlotte, Emily and Anne are a fascinating collective enigma. And Teale's play, which debuted in England in 2005, is determined to avoid the cloying emotionalism of the Hollywood approach. Teale (also an acclaimed television dramatizer of Bronte works) wants us to ponder and contextualize the Brontes, not just be entranced by them.
Oy vey. I'd have settled for a show that actually created a credible milieu populated by women in whom I believe. Or a show that actually sheds light on its own questions. Yet thanks to the mixture of a troubled script and an unusually wobbly and inauthentic production from the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, "Bronte" feels like a long, ponderous plod.
Part of the problem is that the playwright wants it all ways — the actors know they're in a play, but broad swaths of the piece also proceed in realistic style. It's very hard to get your head around the narrative trajectory, especially because James Bohnen's production is a visual mess that falls into the perilous chasm between symbolism and specifics.
Teale forged the unfortunate device of having Bronte characters — Cathy from "Wuthering Heights," Bertha from "Jane Eyre" — show up in the parsonage, as writhing counterpoints to the sisters' more repressed personalities. Linda Gillum has the thankless job of playing these ghostly, sensual apparitions. Although it's not really the fault of the actress, those interludes are painful to watch.
Things do get a little better as they go — in particular Susan Shunk's Charlotte starts to flourish as a credible creation. And there are other sincere performances — including Carrie Coon's moody Emily and Rachel Sondag's nicely understated Anne. For Bronte fans and students, the piece will have some interest.
But the Yorkshire accents prove tough to master — it sounds at times as if these Brontes are from Eastern Europe. And this show mostly remains a blurred and uncertain swirl that feels weirdly unaware of the lonely, romantic moors just outside the Brontes' door. (Chris Jones)
The people from the theatre company Remy Bumppo have been so kind as to provide us with all kind of information regarding their upcoming production of Polly Teale's Brontë from March 20 – May 4 at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 N Lincoln Ave. Chicago, IL 60614.
Meet three literary giants, all under 5’2’’We'll have further information on this play soon.Remy Bumppo Theatre Company presents the American-premiere of Brontë, March 20 – May 4 at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 N Lincoln Ave. Chicago, IL 60614. (BrontëBlog readers are invited to take advantage of a special 2 for 1 ticket offer for any performance of Brontë within the month of March!)*
Directed by James BohnenFeaturing Artistic Associates Gregory Anderson and Linda Gillum
How is it possible that three Victorian spinsters, living in isolation on the Yorkshire moors, could have written some of the most powerful and passionate fiction of all time? Polly Teale’s inventive drama examines the lives of three of the most studied and discussed writers of all time. Spurred by their brother’s tumultuous personal life, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë write from their remote home on the Yorkshire moors. Brontë evokes both the real and fantasy worlds of the Brontës, as the sisters’ austere surroundings give way to the boundless power of imagination.
Special Offer: Receive a 2 for 1 ticket offer on any performance of Brontë within the month of March!* Call box office at 773-871-3000 or Click Here and order online using code “WOMEN” to receive your discount. *Not valid opening night, March 24. Offer based on availability. Not to be combined with any other offers.
Between the LinesMicael Clarke is the author of Brontë-related papers like Brontë's Jane Eyre and the Grimms' Cinderella SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 40, Number 4, Autumn 2000, pp. 695-710
Dates: Wed. 3/26 at 6:30 pm - Micael Clarke, Loyola University professor and Brontë scholar; Sat. 4/5 at 1:30 pm - Peter Davis, Remy Bumppo resident dramaturg
Location: Upstairs Mainstage, Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Our newly expanded and renamed literary lecture series, Between the Lines will feature guest experts sharing their insights on the play and leading a pre-show discussion. Last season, Adlai Stevenson III joined us to discuss the role his father played in the political climate of The Best Man; this year will bring other fascinating speakers. Due to popular demand, this unique series will be offered this season on both a Wednesday evening and a Saturday matinee. The conversation begins one hour before show-time, and concludes with a post-show talkback. The Between the Lines program also includes a superb study guide created by resident dramaturg Peter Davis, as well as pre-show refreshments.
Get the most out of your Remy Bumppo experience - join us to see what's Between the Lines.
The $10 ticket includes the pre-show lecture, refreshments and study guide. Tickets for the performance are purchased separately. Between the Lines tickets are available through the box office at 773-871-3000.
The Chicago Daily Herald reviews the ongoing performances of Polly Teale's Brontë by the Remy Bummpo Company in Chicago. It's not a very positive review but includes an interesting video of the production:Polly Teale weaving historical fact with literary fiction in her play "Brontë" will no doubt delight fans of sisters Charlotte ("Jane Eyre") and Emily ("Wuthering Heights"). That, plus the match-the-character-to-its-real-life-counterpart, combined with a glimpse of the lesser known Brontë siblings: sister Anne, also a writer, and brother Branwell, a minor painter, should keep Brontë aficionados entertained.Another (rather bad) revi
But it's unlikely Teale's earnest but problematic bio-drama will satisfy theater-lovers. James Bohnen's U.S. premiere for Remy Bumppo Theatre is competent and well-acted. "Brontë's" main problems rest with contrived storytelling that too often pulls us out of the action. The play finds its footing in the more straightforward second act. But that can't quite make up for a tedious act that precedes it, intrusive characters who disrupt the narrative, or the play's inexplicable and pointless prologue where the actresses playing the sisters don their costumes while they deliver the Brontë backstory.
There's ambitious Charlotte (Susan Shunk), who yearns for success and the bit of immortality that accompanies it; enigmatic Emily (Carrie A. Coon), who craves anonymity; and Anne (Rachel Sondag), the trio's social conscience. The physical resemblance between Shunk, Coon and Sondag make them credible sisters. But it's the convincing combination of intelligence, delicacy and resolve reflected in their performances that make these characters memorable.
Some of the play's most intriguing moments involve the blurring of the line between reality and fiction, when characters played by Shunk, Anderson and Clear morph into the literary counterparts (Jane, Heathcliff and Edward Rochester respectively). Unfortunately Teale's other attempts at blurring this line fail. The inclusion of a figment of the sisters' literary imaginations in the form of the Bertha/Cathy character -- a symbol of sexual repression played by Linda Gillum, who deserves better -- is both intrusive and unnecessary. And by the second act, the gimmick has worn thin. (...)
Besides history lesson and literary homage, "Brontë" also stands as a testament to female empowerment and to the creative impulse (vividly expressed by set designer Tim Morrison's Yorkshire moors, which literally break through the walls of the Brontë home). Just as nature breaks its bonds to intrude upon domestic life, the artist shatters the bonds proscribed by gender and society to express herself. (Barbara Vitello)
ew can be read on the Chicago Reader:When it comes to “the long parade to the graveyard,” Blanche DuBois has nothing on the Brontes, though for the celebrated literary family the parade was exceedingly short: six siblings, all dead before age 40, three of them in the span of less than a year. They grew up in the shadow of their father’s Yorkshire church, their front yard a cemetery. Behind them rolled the seemingly endless moors, made famous by Emily’s tragic romance Wuthering Heights.Picture credits: Johnny Knight. Source.
Theirs is a story tailor-made for drama: God on one side, nature on the other, and a singular trio of authoresses—plus their troubled only brother—in between. The sisters quietly defied the conventions of 1840s England (when women were barred from using the the Bronte’s local library) by creating two of the most memorable novels in the canon, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, with its fearsome “madwoman in the attic,” and Wuthering Heights (which received perhaps the greatest compliment any British novel can earn: a Monty Python parody, in which the doomed lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, proclaim their undying passion for each other via semaphore). Baby Anne usually gets short shrift, but her protofeminist novel about a woman fleeing an abusive marriage, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, has found its own adherents in recent decades. No wonder the Brontes continue to exert a pull on the popular imagination.
So why does Polly Teale’s play, Bronte, in its American premiere with Remy Bumppo, feel so disappointingly stiff and unfocused? It’s not because the playwright doesn’t know her stuff. Teale, who works with Shared Experience Theatre, a longtime London fringe company, has previously adapted Jane Eyre as well as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Bertha, the madwoman of Charlotte’s opus, has her say. Nor is it because the actors in James Bohnen’s staging aren’t up to snuff. They commit to the show with dignity and grace, even when their Yorkshire accents falter.
Mostly it seems the subject matter overwhelmed Teale. John O’Keefe, another playwright obsessed with the family, penned a biodrama also entitled Bronte, which I saw in a production at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 2000. Like this one, that play contained a surfeit of detail. But O’Keefe managed to capture the delicate admixture of outsize imagination, longing, and mordant wit at the heart of the sisters’ best writing. Teale never achieves a similar distillation.
Teale’s Bronte begins with a gambit that doesn’t pay off. The actors playing Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (Susan Shunk, Carrie A. Coon, and Rachel Sondag) enter as themselves and ask the audience a series of questions as they put on their period costumes: How did three women who “weren’t pretty or fashionable and never had sex,” (well, except for Charlotte, who died at 39 from complications of pregnancy) manage to create such indelible, passionate characters? How did they defy the odds of their isolation and early tragedies, including the deaths of their mother and two older sisters? In short, how’d they do it?
These aren’t bad questions, but most Bronte fans have asked them many times before; I for one would greatly prefer to plunge wholeheartedly into the world of the family and draw my conclusions. And in any case, Teale’s script doesn’t deliver strong answers. Worse, her attempt to incorporate as much of the family history as possible—the timeline restructured in a confusing series of flashbacks—flattens the personalities of the trio into archetypes bordering on cliche. Charlotte’s the pragmatic, ambitious one; Emily’s the spooky girl; and Anne’s socially conscientious. Somehow the Brontes come off here as an early Victorian version of Charlie’s Angels, working undercover (in their first works they used the male noms de plume Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell) to fight patriarchy with their pens.
By default the Brontes’ brother, ne’er-do-well Branwell (Gregory Anderson), becomes both the tragic hero and villain of the piece. A failure at nearly everything except self-destruction, Branwell’s fearsome appetites and self-pity found their way into each of his sisters’ books, along with his imaginative nature. It’s not hard to see him as the tortured Heathcliff, brooding over his lost love for a married woman, or the increasingly cruel husband at the heart of Wildfell Hall—and, in fact, Anderson appears as both.
But if the play is about the sisters, as Teale’s metatheatrical intro would lead one to believe, we need to see more of their conflicts and shifting alliances. A scene in which Charlotte and Anne let slip to Emily that they have violated her confidence by revealing her true identity to their publisher should be a key to the conflicts among them, but it isn’t given sufficient heft.
The worst decision Teale makes is to incorporate the characters of Catherine and Bertha, both played by Linda Gillum. It’s a thankless task that mostly requires Gillum to crawl around the stage looking like a wild-haired vampiric wraith out of an Edvard Munch painting. This device reduces the sisters’ layered and philosophically meditative writings to cliches of gothic insanity.
In the second act, when Teale lets go of these intrusions and simply allows the story to breathe, it improves quite a bit. And one would have to be hard-hearted beyond belief not to be moved by the cascading series of deaths that beset the family toward the end. Branwell, then Emily, and finally Anne succumb to consumption, leaving Charlotte alone with their flinty father, Patrick—whose own struggles against the deprivations of his Irish childhood suggest the real source of the girls’ gumption. Patrick Clear skillfully shifts among multiple roles, including those of the demanding patriarch and Charlotte’s uncertain suitor and eventual husband, Arthur Nicholls Bell. Shunk’s Charlotte takes on richer shadings as the tragedies draw to their conclusion, and Coon’s Emily hints at the paradoxes of a shy woman who has an unapologetic sensualist hidden inside her. Sondag’s Anne is a model of decency, but onstage as in life her story feels crammed in at the edges of her sisters’.
A landscape painting at the back of Tim Morrison’s set inadvertently provides an apt metaphor for Teale’s loving but frustratingly flawed tribute. Depicting the moors, it contains suggestions of wilderness just beyond the next hill—but it’s also repetitive, flat, and devoid of the most telling details. (Kerry Reid)
As we have announced previously, tomorrow, March 20, the Remy Bumppo Company will premiere Polly Teale's Brontë in Chicago. Remember that we have a 2x1 promotion for BrontëBlog readers for the March performances.Brontë by Polly TealeJames Bohnen, the Artistic Director of Remy Bumppo and director of this production of Brontë has been so kind as to answer a few questions. Our thanks also to Christopher Carr from the Marketing Department of the Theatre:
Directed by James Bohnen
Featuring Artistic Associates Gregory Anderson and Linda Gillum
Playing at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
March 20 - May 4, 2008
7:30 PM
Sundays: 2:30 PM
Complete Schedule
Cast
Carrie A. Coon ... Emily
Susan Shunk ... Charlotte
Rachel Sondag ... Anne
Gregory Anderson ... Branwell
Linda Gillum ... Bertha/Cathy
Patrick Clear ... Patrick
Creative/Production
James Bohnen ... Director
Patia Bartlett ... Stage Manager
Tim Morrison ... Scenic Designer
Judith Lundberg ... Costume Designer
Richard Norwood ... Lighting Designer
Ross Moreno ... Properties Designer
Lindsay Jones ... Sound Designer
This inventive drama, originally developed by the U.K.’s acclaimed Shared Experience Theatre Company, examines the lives of three of the most studied and discussed writers of all time. Spurred by their brother’s tumultuous personal life, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë write from their remote home on the Yorkshire moors. The real and the imagined collide as the characters the sisters have created come to life. Polly Teale’s Bronte explores the question of how a trio of Victorian spinsters could have produced some of the most passionate literature ever written.
BrontëBlog: Why did you decide on such a play as Brontë? Were you acquainted with Polly Teale's work before?Categories: Theatre
James Bohnen: I loved the energy in the theatricality and the life-giving energy despite all the sadness. I knew her work through reading, and had seen After Miss Rochester.
BB: What has been the most difficult thing about this production? Have there been many challenges?
JB: It is a very challenging piece. The swiftness of scenes, the way they bounce around in time, the fact that there is so much known about the sisters – and finding ways to use that information, but still stay in the play’s story, which compresses events and re-orders things somewhat.
BB: Could you tell us about the direction of the play?
JB: Just lots of hard work and listening to the hearts and minds of the actors.
BB: Could you describe the stage, props, etc. for us?
JB: The stage is much as described in the text. Simple, sturdy furniture, the outline of the rooms delineated with tape on the floor. We have a section of wall and a door frame and a long, sweeping panoramic view of the moor and sky that penetrates the house.
BB: An American company - the Acting Company - recently toured the US with their production of Jane Eyre, another Brontë-related play by Polly Teale - did you get to see this? If so, what were your impressions?
JB: I did not see this, but the printed edition has a wonderful introduction written by Ms. Teale that I found very helpful in the preparations for Brontë.
BB: Also, a little over a year ago the Wellesley Summer Theatre Company performed Brontë - did you get to see this?
JB: Alas, no. I work at a Shakespeare Festival in the summers.
BB: And have you ever seen any of the three Brontë-related plays by Polly Teale staged by the British company Shared Experience?
JB: I saw After Mrs Rochester and enjoyed it enormously. I was fascinated by her mixture of the factual and the fictional and how she telescoped time.
BB: What do you think the audience will enjoy most about Brontë?
JB: I hope they stay engaged with the women as people, not as myth.
BB: Brontë is a ground-breaking play in many aspects, what do you think the audience will get to carry home with them afterwards?
JB: I hope they take home a bit of the Brontë’s courage, determination and passion.
The Spectator reviews a recently-published book on governesses: Other People's Daughters. The Life And Times Of The Governess by Ruth Brandon. The book cover is, in our opinion, beautiful and the inside references to Jane Eyre are evident. Actually, as Ruth Brandon’s study declares, it was very rare indeed for a governess to marry her employer. Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre tell us much more about the 19th century’s fantasies and fears than about its realities. (Philip Hensher)What we have been unable to find is the table of contents, so we don't know whether the more realistic versions of governesses' marriages in Agnes Grey and Shirley (whose governesses actually share the same maiden name) are featured in the book or not.
The title of Polwhele's bilious production - "The Unsex'd Females" - helped to create a climate in which generations of women lived in fear of the label "bluestocking", which became an insult. In the 19th century, the Brontë sisters and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) felt it necessary to hide their genius under male pseudonyms; in the 20th century the word conjured up images of desiccated female dons. The original "blues" were much more various than this stereotype suggests, and their dilemmas about intellect, fashion and femininity are still with us today. "Brilliant Women" restores them to their rightful place as our foremothers, the missing link in an unbroken chain of female creativity. The struggle for the right to be clever, sexy and feminine is still going on. (Joan Smith)Incidentally and unrelated to the Brontës save for this exhibition we were reading a book the other day where this quotation by Sydney Smith appeared: If the stocking be blue, the petticoat must be long. It made us smile in a very sad way.
• 'Bronte' boy: Evanston actor Patrick Clear has multiple roles in the new Remy Bumppo Theatre production of "Bronte," previewing March 20 and opening March 24(through May 4). He plays Patrick Bronte, Mr. Rochester and others in this play that explores the Victorian literary family of Charlotte Bronte. Clear also has a small role in the upcoming Batman film, "Dark Knight," as well as in a made-for-TV movie called "In the Best Interest of the Children." For more on "Bronte," visit http://www.remybumppo.org/. (Dorothy Andries and Michael Bonesteel)Don't forget that BrontëBlog readers have a special offer to get 2x1 tickets for the play.
For nearly two decades, Kalamazoo Ballet Company founder Therese Bullard dreamed of staging a "Jane Eyre''-based ballet, and finally last June, hers debuted on the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre stage. But as she breathed a sigh of relief, so did her body.A couple of blogs today sing praises of Jane Eyre: Kylie's Book Nook and Fresh Ideas For You. Not Quite Write draws inspiration form the Brontës. And SixSisters posts two gorgeous ACEOs on Jane Eyre.
She had to be hospitalized for exhaustion, Bullard said Wednesday in a candid yet light-hearted interview in which she focused on the positive side of being forced to get much-needed rest.
"After being incapacitated for a month, I liked the look of myself in the mirror,'' she said, with a hearty laugh.
"I had lost some weight."
Bullard, who has taught ballet in Kalamazoo since 1963, has had to close her ballet company periodically in recent months because of the events of last summer and later, a boiler problem in the building that houses her dance studio. The boiler has since been replaced.
Now Bullard's company is back in full swing and holding performances, which serve as fund-raisers for operational costs. (Roberto Acosta)
How did women who lived sexless lives end up writing the steamy and passionate "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre"?Salon reviews the new novel of Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End and makes the following passing comment:
If one is expecting an answer from the American premiere of "Bronte," playing at Remy Bumppo Theatre in Chicago, one will be sorely disappointed.
Written by Polly Teale, this limp and lumbering work lacks dramatic insight into the lives of the spinster novelists who lived in the English moors in the 19th century.
The father (Patrick Clear) of the three Bronte sisters -Charlotte (Susan Shunk), Emily (Carrie A. Coon) and Anne (Rachel Sondag) - was born into an illiterate Irish family but became self-educated and went on to college.
Because he was transformed by literature, the Bronte patriarch encouraged his daughters to read in a time when women were far removed from such intellectual pursuits.
The sister's brother, Branwell (Gregory Anderson), became a gambler, an alcoholic and a drug addict. The Bronte women used him as a model for their fictional male characters.
Surely, an examination of such a family would make for intriguing drama. But it doesn't.
Teale's tedious script doesn't offer clear motivation for these people. Indeed, the father who pulled himself up from poverty and the brother who had the family's expectations pulling him down have interesting possibilities that are not realized.
As presented in this production, the Bronte women come across as so boring that it's impossible to believe they wrote the hot, best-selling novels of their time.
James Bohnen's direction isn't much of a help, either. His staging staggers from natural realism to dreamy symbolism that has the play lurching between "now" and "then" and some place in between.
Because the Brontes' lives were uneventful, Teale attempts to get beneath the surface of the women's dull everyday existence into their inner emotions.
Teale attempts this by dredging up ghostly incarnations of characters from "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre." The episodes in which Linda Gillum, who portrays these ghostly specters, swishes, swirls and falls into a faint come across as laughably amateurish.
Not only are the characters in this production lifeless and the isolated environment in which they lived poorly evoked, but the accents of the performers are all over the place. One actor speaks in an English accent, another seems to have a Scottish dialect, and still another leans to an Irish lilt.
The production pokes along at such a sluggish pace that paying attention to "Bronte" is a struggle. That's a shame because the Bronte sisters deserve better. (Betty Mohr)
That equipoise is a function of the author's ear, and in her last book, the bestselling "The Jane Austen Book Club," the pitch rarely wavered, right up to and including the title, which managed in a single swipe to siphon off its target demographic. Presented with that book cover, pretty much every straight man in America executes a 180-degree pivot, scanning the horizon for Colin Harrison titles, while his bookish girlfriend -- the one with the Colin Firth screen saver and the cats named after the Brontë sisters and the serious stash of tea -- stays rooted in place, eyes shimmering. She's home. (Louis Bayard)Via Trashionista we have noticed the recently published Freya North's top 10 romps and romances in The Guardian:
4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëRandom Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover comments Justine Picardie's Daphne. The book has re-awaken the Brontëite inside her:
Another classic - but where Moll Flanders is deliciously bawdy, Jane Eyre is devastatingly romantic. The passion comes from the love between Jane and Rochester, so pure yet so constantly thwarted - they literally go through fire for it. I read somewhere that you won't understand true love until you've read this book.
With that one small caveat I can say that I found this book fascinating and intriguing and has, once more, sent me back to my book cases to look at all my Bronte biographies, pull out my old Bronte Society papers, and plan a visit to Haworth again and perhaps take the walk to Top Withens. This may have to wait until the autumn, best not to visit the Parsonage at the height of the tourist season, best to visit when the days are drawing in, the lamps are lit and the wind is 'wuthering' and just wallow in the atmosphere.And the Brontë epiphany continues...
And apropos of nothing, when I first visited Haworth as a teenager I stayed at a bed and breakfast in the village and was told by the landlady that they had had 'one of them authors' staying the week before and I was having her room. As with all things serendipitous, it seemed the former lodger was Winifred Gerin, whose biography of Branwell threatened to be published before Daphne's. So there you go. Make of that what you will. (Elaine Simpson-Long)
I'm what's known in literary circles as a ''Jane-ite''— someone who rereads Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre at least once a year — so I was prepared to loathe The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë, which transforms Brontë and her sisters Emily and Anne into 19th-century sleuths investigating the stabbing death of a young governess. But Laura Joh Rowland (Red Chrysanthemum) not only evokes Victorian-era London with a sure hand in this detective novel, she creates a believable Charlotte whose intelligence, stubbornness, and wit recall Jane at every turn. Even more important, the mystery itself is particularly fine. A- (Tina Jordan)Interested? In some days we will publish an interview with the author.
The American premiere of Polly Teale's drama, which explores the lives and works of Victorian-era writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte; previews Thu.-March 23; opens March 24 through May 4; $24-$40, tickets: remybumppo.org.Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; 773-871-3000.Remember that we have a promotion (2x1 tickets in the March performances) for our readers.
Wilson gives a quick history of famous close sibling relationships, as well as drawing parallels with Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Cathy falls in love with Heathcliff, a "surrogate" brother), no doubt also wishing to conjure up another analogy with the Brontë women and their brother, Branwell. (Lesley McDowell)On the blogosphere: Anna Van der Hulst's Blog posts a couple of pictures of the Parsonage in Haworth. A Comfy Chair and a Good Book talks about Jane Eyre.
The Dance COLEctive (Feb. 21-23; Dance Center of Columbia College) Choreographer Margi Cole presents "Written on the Body," a work that uses the lives of the Brontë sisters to explore gender roles and stereotypes. Call (312) 344-6600.We will return to these productions in due time.Brontë (March 20-May 4, Remy Bumppo Theatre) Poly Teale's drama brings the Bronte sisters -- Charlotte, Emily and Anne -- to life. Call (773) 871-3000.
Artists have reacted in different ways to the possibilities offered by books as a means of expression. Powerful interpreters of texts include Balthus and his dramatic illustrations for the narrative of Wuthering Heights.C.A. Bridges in The Daytona Beach News predicts what the results of his new year's resolutions will be. One of them concerns us:
READ THE GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURESo much time talking about the Byronic influence on Heathcliff's character sometimes causes some little misunderstandings:Won’t even get past the first week with this one. Sorry, Dickens. Forget it, Bronte sisters. Not a chance, any Russian writer at all. As soon as the first hint of multi-layered prose hits my forebrain I’m outta there. I will, however, make a greater effort to watch more movies based on great works of literature.
That effort will fade away by mid-May, to be replaced with a half-hearted resolution to watch more "Simpsons" episodes that reference great works of literature.
Byron, who was the best known poet of his day, personified Romanticism at its brooding, Heathcliff-like best, living fast, dying young and having a good-looking corpse at the age of 36, in 1824. (Liverpool Daily Post)On the blogosphere: Shelby's Drama List posts a brief comment on, and the trailer from, The Promise, last year's Filipino movie loosely based on Wuthering Heights. Mummy Loves British Costume Shows has a series of miniposts briefly describing several movie and TV adaptations of Jane Eyre. The Pink Heart Society discusses Jane Eyre 2006.
Brontë features Artistic Associates Gregory Anderson and Linda Gillum. The cast also includes guest artists Patrick Clear, Carrie Coon (as Emily Brontë), Susan Shunk (as Charlotte Brontë), and Rachel Sondag (as Anne Brontë).What's very important here is that there's a special promotion to get 2x1 tickets to this play. Click here to learn more.
Artistic Director James Bohnen will direct Brontë as well as a companion piece, On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning, by Eric Overmyer, which runs May 15 through June 1, 2008. “Both Brontё and On the Verge explore the lives of audacious and extraordinary women whose imaginations soar above the restrictions of Victorian society.”
The Brontë design team includes Set Designer Tim Morrison, Costume Designer Judith Lundberg, Lighting Designer Richard Norwood, Sound Designer Lindsay Jones and Prop Master Ross Moreno.
The world premiere of Brontë was presented by Shared Experience in England and directed by the playwright. Shared Experience’s mission is to celebrate the connection between actors and audiences by creating a visceral “shared experience.” Brontё offers a unique theatrical style indicative of Shared Experience. Uniting both physical and text-based theatre, Brontё gives theatrical form to emotion and imagination. Audiences see the actresses transform into the sisters onstage, and fictional characters from the famous novels intrude on the action.
This is Polly Teale’s third play in a trilogy exploring Charlotte Brontë and her literature. She is also the playwright and director of Shared Experience’s acclaimed productions of Jane Eyre and After Mrs. Rochester, for which she won the Evening Standard Award for Best Director and a Time Out Award for Best Production.
6 Read a British classic: According to the Orange Prize for Fiction, we spend an average of three hours a day watching TV, but just 11 minutes reading books.You can't go wrong with this one, especially after reading that appalling figure.
Dig out your old paperbacks, whether Hardy or Dickens, Austen or the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott or Dylan Thomas. For children, CS Lewis has just trounced JK Rowling in a poll of the best children's books of all time, so pass on your copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Judith Woods)
The Seventh Aldeburgh Literary FestivalCategories: Alert, Art-Exhibitions, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Talks, Theatre, Wuthering Heights,
29th February - 2nd March 2008
29th February 11.30 am to 12.30 am Kate Drayton on the Brontes and childhood: ‘Our fiery Catherine was no better than a wailing child’ (Wuthering Heights).
Kate Drayton is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia. Her research focuses on late 18th and early 19th century literature and medicine. This talk will consider the representation of childhood in the novels of the Brontes, child psychology in the Victorian period and Mrs Gaskell’s influential biography of her ‘dear friend’ Charlotte Bronte, which has shaped the way we think about the childhoods of Charlotte and her sisters.
£8.00 in the James Cable Room at the White Lion Hotel. Coffee will be available.
Keighley News publishes some additional information about the Captured Past exhibition at the Old School Room in Haworth:A Brontë preservation group aims to keep Haworth residents in the picture about their history.HollywoodChicago reviews Remy Bumppo's performances of Polly Teale's Brontë in Chicago:
It hopes villagers will flock to the Old School Room for Captured Past, a photographic exhibition covering more than 100 years of Haworth's history.
Some depict the village around the time the Brontë sisters achieved fame with their novels.
The Old School Room is where the three sisters and brother Branwell all taught in the 19th century.
Organisers of the exhibition hope to attract many people who have never before been in the building and spark interest in a £1 million plan to refurbish the building and secure its future.
The Brontë Spirit campaign brings together the Brontë Society, which runs the nearby Parsonage Museum, and neighbouring St Michael and All Saints Church. The groups are spending an initial £43,300 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund planning the restoration project.
Project officer Dr Angela Redmond said: "The oldest photograph was taken the mid-1850s and perfectly illustrates the kind of lifestyle that the Brontë family experienced.
"It also has the Old School Room as a backdrop which is a wonderful link with what we're trying to achieve today.
"Many people who live in the district have never been inside the Old School Room and this will be their chance to have a look around."
Dr Redmond hoped the building could become a heritage centre as well as advancing arts and education within the district.
The exhibition will normally be open seven days a week (1-4pm) until September, and admission is free. The pictures have been supplied by Haworth historian Stephen Wood and the exhibition organiser is Stephen Whitehead. (David Knights)
Teale explores the simply celibate life in which storied sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne mostly only have themselves, their pens and their unbridled imaginations. Was it their chastity that unleashed so much repressed titillation or was such eroticism merely a fiery choice for absorbing prose?Interested? You're still in time to profit from our 2x1 promotion for BrontëBlog readers.
Moreover, why well over a century later do their words still haunt our minds? In her decision to return to the beginning with “Brontë,” Teale says we are fascinated by these maidens because they “broke the mold against all odds” and yet “they were made by it,” too.
Having to publish in pseudonym because only men at that time were permitted the right to write, Teale credits their self-educated father as the sisters’ door-opening and awe-inspiring catalyst.
While they were certainly spurred by their brother’s tumultuous personal life, too, it was their father who resiliently swore by the transformative power of literature and art.
In the Chicago realization of this storied mammoth, director James Bohnen about faces the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater into the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Set in the year 1845, the cast clearly co-exists in harmony without a weak link and with authentic conviction. That said, Linda Gillum plays the decisive oddity as she is the sisters’ manifestation in written form who alternates from a feather-obsessed worrywart to an erotic canine.
With a 15-minute intermission, the performance’s top-drawer staying power helps you disregard its relatively lengthy time commitment. As a notice to the red-ink department, though, the grandeur of the subject matter sometimes lends to excessive gabbing that can dash out one ear just as swift as it scurried in the other.
More so than her sisters, Carrie A. Coon as the second-eldest Emily epitomizes the readily regarded phenom who died after a fleeting blaze of genius as realized in “Wuthering Heights”. It was her sole novel.
Susan Shunk plays the eldest, Charlotte (best known for famous British novel “Jane Eyre”), and Rachel Sondag rounds out the trio as the youngest, Anne, who history has overshadowed in favor of her more fêted sisters. Sondag typifies Anne’s more sharp, realistic and ironic writing style as a stark contrast to the romanticism exemplified by Charlotte and Emily.
Patrick Clear as Patrick Brontë – who plays their curate father and changed the family’s last name from Brunty to Brontë – masterfully oscillates from a temporary blind man to various other characters through the devices of dialect and mind/body renovation.
Gregory Anderson as the brother, Branwell, delves deeply into the mind of a man who was regarded by the family as its most talented member. Plagued by insurmountable expectations, though, he was driven to binge drinking. Only one scene in this production, though, harks back to the central addiction that launched the meeting of his grim reaper.
Together, these five Brontës stand the test of time as one of the most imperative stories in which to immerse in both written and theatrical form. This Chicago production of the family’s legend would sell even the Brontës themselves on the sweeping meaning of their message. (Adam Fendelman)
"Get as many anecdotes as possible. If you love your reader and want to be read get anecdotes!" This note-to-self, as penned, by Elizabeth Gaskell before she embarked on her life of Charlotte Brontë, is still sound advice for any aspiring biographer. (Emma Hagestadt, Boyd Tonkin & Katy Guest)And now, some Brontës on the blogosphere: Cartelera10 reviews, in Spanish, Wuthering Heights 1939. Milady Vérité posts about Jane Eyre
The Universe, 3830s. Pretty much the same plot, except Thornfield is one of the many moons orbiting the Planet England. Also, it’ll be Commander Rochester instead of Mister, since it sounds so much more sci-fi. (He fought in the Titanium Wars or something.) Rochester’s wife is some kind of fancy cyborg. If she were a robot or a droid, there would be no problem getting rid of her, but because she is partially human, it’s against the law (or something). And because the human part of her is on the crazy side, Rochester has to hide her. She’ll be this perfect blond blue-eyed woman of 21, because she doesn’t age visibly – adding to the creep factor. (Stella)zuham focuses on the topic of revenge in his/her response to Wuthering Heights, latifah99 is more concerned with the complexity of characters. The Crall Space finds similarities between Jane Eyre and Harry Potter (something that has been discussed previously on BrontëBlog)
Well, how's this for a plan - why not adopt a book and help save a national treasure while you're at it?We have visited the Adopt a Book website and we have found two orphan Brontë books for you:
The British Library are offering an Adopt a Book scheme – you can help protect the world’s greatest book collection as well as give your mum something a little bit different from the usual chocolates and flowers. (Shelley Marsden)
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Wuthering Heights/Agnes Grey Author:Emily Brontë /Anne Brontë Published Date:1858 Library shelfmark:12654.b.1 |
Some of you may have read my previous blogs this month where I discussed Jane Eyre as a guiding influence on my writing of Too Wicked To Tame, so lest I risk beating a dead horse, let me just say this - the Yorkshire moors, the hovering threat of madness, a wicked hero with a decided lack of restraint. These elements were definite starting points for Too Wicked To Tame, but I thought I'd share a bit more - mostly what it is you can expect in a Sophie Jordan novel. (Sophie Jordan in RRAH)Let's finish with an announcement for next year, 2008, The Chicago Sun-Times publishes that the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company is preparing Polly Teale's Brontë for the 2007-2008 Season:
"Bronte" (March 20-May 4, 2008): The American premiere of Polly Teale's drama about the Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), that triumvirate of Victorian spinsters whose isolated lives on the Yorkshire moors fostered passionate literature. James Bohnen will direct.Erm... American premiere? And these recent performances in Boston ?
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