As we have reported previously, today (June 2) is the premiere of a new theatrical adaptation of Wuthering Heights in the York Theatre Royal. These are the details:The York Press publishes an interview with Marshall Lancaster:02 - 23 June 2007
York Theatre Royal presents
7:30 PM with 2:00 PM/2:30 PM matinees
After show discussion: Wed 13 JunWuthering Heights
Written by Jane Thornton, adapted from the novel by Emily Brontë
Directed by Sue Dunderdale
Music by Richard Taylor
Designed by Lorna Ritchie
Lighting design by Ciaran Bagnall
With Jessica Harris, Joel Fry, Marshall Lancaster, Kate Ambler and Nick Figgis.
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff are brought together as children and although they are social unequals they are one in spirit. Gradually torn apart by the forces that surround them, Heathcliff is eventually driven away from Wuthering Heights. When he eventually returns it is wreak vengeance on those he holds responsible, with epic and tragic results. Set against the wild, stormy, North Yorkshire Moors in the early 1800s this is a fast moving, classic tale of lost love, passion and revenge.
More information:From tomorrow he plays a quartet of roles - Edgar Linton, Linton, Old Earnshaw and Joseph - in Jane Thornton's stage adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights at York Theatre Royal.(...)
Now Wuthering Heights brings Lancaster to Yorkshire.
"My agent mentioned it, and I'd worked with the director Sue Dunderdale on Peak Practice. It was just a guest part in it, as a garage owner whose wife had something wrong with her belly. I had to go into the doctor's surgery and kick up a fuss, so I did that, enjoyed it and I'm really glad Sue saw me for Wuthering Heights."
In rehearsal, he has enjoyed the multiple-role playing in Thornton's adaptation with its cast of only five."
I like the multi-roles; you can feel a bit schizophrenic, but it's about finding
the differences without making them too different, " he says.
"In comedy you can go as far as you like with differences, but with this, you have to make little differences, so we've been honing them down, rather than letting them become big caricatures.
"That can be particularly difficult when Joseph is about 80!" (Charles Hutchinson)
How dare anyone put on such a poor Wuthering Heights - and in Yorkshire.EDIT: Luke has replied to this review on this comment.
Heathcliff is dreadful and Cathy is not far behind. Joel Fry, who plays Heathcliff, cannot be heard. He has no presence and gives little indication of caring for Cathy. He has the attitude of a sullen fourth former who has been forced to take part in the school play and would much rather be alone with his Play Station.
Cathy is played as a tomboy, by a whiny voiced Jessica Harris. She is a silly girl and not a wild and wanton young woman. No sign of passion from either of them.
With the exception of Kate Ambler the others in the cast are woefully inadequate. Each has two or more characters to play and the characters must age. That should not present a problem but apparently it does.
Judging by the cast's careless movement Sue Dunderdale, the director, has given little thought to shape, position and physical language.
Jane Thornton's spare and fluid adaptation, used so well by Hull Truck Theatre, covers the two generations in the story with clarity and understanding but in this production the final section is muddled and confusing.
Thornton does include some singing of Emily Bronte's poems. An inspired idea but here they are poorly presented.
Imagine a West Riding woollen mill's interior without machinery and you have the set. It should excite and inspire but it has no effect on this cast and this director. (Kevin Berry)
The New York Observer clearly dislikes the Puppini Sisters's cover of Wuthering Heights.AWARD-WINNING theatre company LipService make a long awaited return to Wakefield Theatre Royal on Saturday June 23 with their cult literary spoof Withering Looks.The show takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the lives and works of the Bronte sisters.
It features many of the well-known characters from all the famous novels alongside some completely new ones that LipService have made up.(...)
To book tickets for Withering Looks call the box office on 01924 211311 or book online at www.wakefieldtheatres.co.uk. (Stuart Robinson)
Kate Bush’s ghastly “Wuthering Heights” (...)[is] derailed by a silly surfeit of shtick, gimmicks and low camp. (Rex Reed)More music, do you remember Los Campesinos! song with the Jane Eyre reference? Pitchfork posts about it:
On the flip, "Don't Tell Me to Do the Math(s)" reverses the band's usual M.O., bringing the dance floor to the bookstore rather than vice versa. Dewey decimals and Jane Eyre disses get a lift from a potent guitar hook, violins, and still more glockenspiel. (Marc Hogan)The blogosphere is also full of Brontë references. This class is reading Wuthering Heights and publishes some of the discussions online. Plasticsturgeon reviews Cara Lockwood's Wuthering High. Author Jeanne-Marie Leach is interviewed on PASTimes:
What is the greatest historical novel you’ve ever read and why?Other stories reviews Dame Darcy's illustrated edition of Jane Eyre:
From the classics: Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is the all-time greatest villain because of the depth of his plot for revenge. He is the ultimate bad boy. I do not believe that every villain must have redeeming qualities. As in Wuthering Heights, there are real-life villains who have nothing good inside them. Everyone loves to hate Heathcliff.
The illustrator, an American comic book artist by the name of Dame Darcy, calls herself - randomly - a "neo-Victorian", and obviously loves the novel. But... she seems to miss the point SO MANY TIMES with her illustrations that I found myself questioning both her ability to remember what she's drawn before (Pilot the dog changes colour from one drawing to the next), and to actually restrain her imagination and draw what it says in the book. For example, as I said before, why put Jane on the front cover in front of a burning mansion when Jane doesn't see the Thornfield fire at all but only finds out about it months later? Why do that? It's such an elementary error that I don't know who to blame more... DD for drawing it, or the publishers for not picking her up on it.Categories: Brontëites, Comics, Music, Humour, Jane_Eyre, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
I like the idea of illustrated editions of books, and Jane Eyre is ripe with possibility for such a product. Even doing a gothic-y one is not a bad idea in itself because there is so much in the novel that does fall under the literary definition of The Gothic, but please, GET IT RIGHT. This edition could have been amazing, but instead, it was just irritating. And what is with the photo of the illustrator on the back cover? Such pretentiousness.
As we have posted before, next June (2-23) a new production of Wuthering Heights will be performed at the York Theatre Royal. The York Press carries today an interesting article about it:SUE Dunderdale surveys the task of directing Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's windy, wild tale of ill-fated love and vengeance.In the picture: Wuthering Heights cast of Marshall Lancaster, Joel Fry, Jessica Harris, Nick Figgis and Kate Ambler. (Credits)
"It's a fantastic story and it's a Yorkshire story," says Sue, whose production of Jane Clifford's adaptation opens at York Theatre Royal on June 2.
"All the cast, the stage management and me, we all went up to Haworth, walking up to Top Withens, which they say may be the site of Wuthering Heights, though it's now a ruin.
"It was the first time I'd been there in 20 years; the last time I was there, there was a French film crew making a film about the Brontes. Isabelle Huppert was in it, of course; she seems to be in every French film."
Revived by Yorkshire pudding and onion gravy, Sue returned to the work in hand: staging Clifford's compact adaptation of the tragic story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, first performed on the much smaller Hull Truck stage in 2003. "Damian Cruden the Theatre Royal artistic director had already decided on using this version, partly because it has a cast of only five, which has its advantages and disadvantages and we're focusing on the advantages," says Sue.
"I've gone for a young cast because it's very much a teenage love story. They feel that if they don't marry, they will die. Cathy married at an extremely young age; she was 17 when she married Edgar, and once she dies, Heathcliff feels dead too. He may be walking around, but he feels dead inside. Cathy died partly because she stopped eating, and so did Heathcliff."
Records show the average age of death in Haworth at the time the Brontes lived at the Parsonage was 26, the same age as the cast's average age. "I think that makes it right that it's a very young company," says Sue.
Among her casting selections is Joel Fry for the mixed-race role of Heathcliff.
"I think he's an extraordinary actor. I spotted him at RADA three years ago, when I was working on a course on acting on camera. (...)
No doubt she will be looking to bring out the intensity in Joel Fry that she found in the book. "It's the intensity that strikes you. When I read the novel again, it was like reading one of the Russians. It's like reading a Yorkshire version of Dostoevsky. It's not Jane Austen," says Sue.
"It's the expression of her soul. When you read that all Emily Bronte's life was an interior life, where all she did was walk on the moors, you realise her freedom was in her imagination and in her spirit, and that's what draws you in.
"No two people should be more together than Cathy and Heathcliff, but she makes the major mistake of her life and that destroys them as they miss out on each other.
"We may all like to pretend that we've never done that in our lives, but in her writing Emily has no such pretence. Cathy's decision destroys her life and lives around her."
What Emily did was to frame the story in her inner being and in the world she knew, says Sue.
"Edith Wharton wrote about the same subject, so did Henry James, and they were very different from Emily's spirit, which was close to Dostoevsky, but they all deal with missed opportunities - but Wuthering Heights is more cruel than the rest, extremely cruel.
"There's a grimness and a dryness that make it so Yorkshire," Sue says.
"It's all about being thwarted and thwarted is such a Yorkshire word, isn't it!" (Charles Hutchinson)
York Theatre Royal's Wuthering Heights has a new (bad) review published in The York Press:Check this and this previous posts for more reviews. This comment also provides a different and more positive view.SERIAL spoofing double act Lip Service mischievously sent up Wuthering Heights in Withering Looks; fellow jokers Oddsocks had Cathy and Heathcliff in a permanent strop on the Moors in a tinsel-and-tantrum Christmas version a few years ago.
The jokes were intentional on those occasions, but how come sniggers could be heard at the York Theatre Royal press night on Tuesday? Such a response would have had Emily Bronte skipping supper once more for a lonely stomp across the heather.
Playright Jane Thornton may have cut her teeth on comedy, yet the reaction to Sue Dunderdale's ragged production of her 2003 adaptation was not born of Thornton's comedic prowess.
Granted, Marshall Lancaster's cameo characterisation of the perennially gloomy old Joseph - jaw set like Wildred Brambell's Steptoe - was intentionally humorous, and so too were the wimpy actions of the excellent Lancaster's weakling Linton.
However, it was the production's forlorn struggle for intense passion that sparked the dismissive half-time chatter over the scrum for free sausages and burgers. One name was on everyone's lips: Heathcliff, and not since Cliff Richard's hammy musical 11 years ago has an actor looked so uncomfortable in this elemental role.
Joel Fry was talent-spotted by Dunderdale while at RADA and is destined for his film breakthrough in 10,000 BC next year, but it could be another 10,000 years before he is asked back to York. He has the look of a young Jimi Hendrix, even dressing not unlike him, but he mumbled and shuffled and slouched, and his diction was as languid as his gait.
Almost perversely, Fry is at his loudest when singing flat on his back on Lorna Ritchie's bizarre set of strips of ripped sheets, metal steps and strands of wool, with not a Yorkshire moor in sight. Save for its sense of height and wind, it is as characterless as Fry.
Thornton says she focused on the passion in her adaptation, and the still inexperienced Fry needs to show a whole heap more, particularly as he is the only actor who plays just one role in this five-hander. He has to be the play's tempestuous force, around which everyone takes their turn to die, but he isn't.
Jessica Harris's Catherine Earnshaw/Catherine Linton lack variety of emotion and vocal tone, and she is too light. Yet Thornton's fast-moving script, with its multiple narrators and swift scene and costume changes, can work well, as proved by Nick Figgis and Kate Ambler joining Lancaster in rising above the problems.
Richard Taylor's musical settings of Bronte poems are a successful innovation, but no moor, no more, Wuthering Heights is a worrying low in a misfiring year at the Theatre Royal. (Richard Hutchinson) (Picture: Jessica Harris and Joel Fry in Wuthering Heights at York Theatre Royal) SOURCE
Some months ago we already published a review of the performances of Polly Teale's After Mrs. Rochester in the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Now the production has been performed in the Cave Hill campus, in Barbados and the Barbados Advocate talks about it:Directed by Brian Heap, and featuring the University Players of the Mona Campus, the production looked at how easily one person's real life can be far more fantastic than fiction and how many times the most resonant fiction can function as an escape from a sordid life.Categories: Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights
Both tragic 'and yet darkly funny' in subject matter the production was based on the life of eccentric Dominican novelist Jean Rhys. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea a book chronicling the story of the 'madwoman in the attic' character from Charlotte Brontë 's immortal Jane Eyre.
Hilary Nicholsan played the elderly Jean, a distinguished and yet dishevelled novelist cloistered in her Devon room, getting quietly drunk and narrating her life to the audience. At her side sat actress Nadia Khan, as Bertha Mason, insane, animalistic and wretched.
Khan's role is pivotal to the plot as both the character from Jane Eyre and Jean's own dark alter ego.
Rhys, just like the fictional Mason, grew up in the West Indies and later lived in England. Both women suffered poverty, injustice, and a dependence on men. Teale's plot suggests that Rhys, born Ella Rees Williams, had an obsession with the character because of their similarities.
Thus the audience of the play see young Ella played by Maylynne Walton reading Jane Eyre on one side of the stage, while several actors play out the scenes on the other half.
It is these meta-fictional aspects of the play that made After Mrs Rochester so complex and yet so engaging, for it questions the nature of history and of literature. Where exactly does the author begin to embellish historical fact and where exactly does reality and fiction separate?
In a country where the stories of important historical figures are still cloaked in legend (think Bussa, Rachel Pringle) this is especially fascinating.
Yet, one did not need to know anything about the two novels or about Rhy's life to enjoy the play, which ran along on very strong performances from most of the cast.
As a feminist theatre piece the women actors had far more to work with. Going from naïve 13-year old Rhys to the character in her mid-thirties Walton gave a nuance and complex performance. As the child she was able to convey Ella's awkwardness and her naiveté and later as the young woman she showed Rhys' narcissism, intelligence and deep insecurity. With an amazing control over her body language and voice Walton's performance was often riveting, tragic or amusing depending on what was needed.
So too Khan, who despite having her full head of hair cover her face for the two hours of the play still connected with the audience and Nicholsan who remained central, even as the narrator.
Student Nadean Rawlins switched from straight-backed maid Meta to childhood friend Tite so seamlessly you could believe that she was two actresses. Similarly Carla Moore fully embodied cynical British friend Maudie but did not seem as sparkling as Stella the wife of Author Ford Maddox Ford.
Noelle Kerr had some trouble projecting her voice as Jane Eyre, but was a dead-on with the accent as a young child and later as Jean's daughter.
This left male actors Karl Williams, Jean-Paul Menou and Rooney Chambers with just enough room for character development to deliver understated but believable performances.
Dark and moving, After Mrs Rochester was well worth the ticket price, Kudos to EBCCI for striving to bring good theatre both local and otherwise to the Barbadian audience. (Khalil Goodman) (Picture: Here cast members (from left) Karl Williams, Hilary Nicholson, Carla Moore, Nadian Khan and Maylynne Walton act out a scene.) SOURCE
A new Wuthering Heights Theatrical production is announced for next June in York:Some days ago we presented The Collecting Place Blog where the new project of photographer Simon Warner and the Brontë Parsonage Museum can be followed:Marshall Lancaster, who played DC Chris Skelton in the cult BBC1 cop drama [Life in Mars], is to appear as Old Earnshaw, Joseph, Edgar Linton and Linton in Jane Thornton's adaptation of Wuthering Heights at York Theatre Royal from June 2 to 23.
Rehearsals for this repertory production start on May 8 under the direction of Sue Dunderdale, who directed last year 's world premiere of Pam Gems' Mrs Pat at the Theatre Royal.
Tickets for Wuthering Heights go on sale this week on 01904 623568. (The York Press)
The Collecting Place project is now underway at the Brontë Parsonage Museum . A small group of sight impaired young people are working with Simon Warner on a photographic collaboration which will result in an exhibition at the museum in May/ June. The exhibition will feature large format negatives and prints of Brontë related landmarks and landscapes (see attached poster) created using a walk-in camera obscura. Please take a look at the project blog which includes postings from the participating children and is a wonderful record of progress so far. The blog will chart the development of the project over the coming weeks – see http://www.thecollectingplace.blogspot.com/Some new (and nice) pictures have been uploaded.
There are in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights all the elements of intense and spectacular drama. Jane Thornton's sensitive adaptation has pared down the action, eliminated the superfluous Lockwood and shared narrational duties among the cast. This works particularly effectively, especially when characters are relating the circumstances of their own lives - in the third person.Categories: Theatre, Wuthering Heights
Lorna Ritchie's imaginative set resembles something like a ruined mill, its metal staircases and structures still festooned with remnants of wool. It is immensely atmospheric when the moon is rising and the wind howling, and a perfect place for the remorselessly harrowing events to unfold, as the 5-strong ensemble whisks the audience across the Yorkshire moors, down the generations and between the houses of the Earnshaws and Lintons.
Jessica Harris at times bears a marked resemblance to Emily Bronte as the two Catherines, mother and daughter, the one wayward and self-destructive, the other insouciant and repressed. Harris excels in both roles bringing to life Emily's belief that pain and suffering are an integral part of love.
What is Heathcliff: a monster or a martyr? Joel Fry hardly answers this and is certainly not the archetypal Heathcliff, if such exists, bearing in mind the role has been played by a variety of types from Olivier to Cliff Richard. Yet, he undoubtedly brings a sense of the 'moorish, wild and knotty' to which Emily referred.
The hard-working Marshall Lancaster superbly differentiates by voice and posture all the characters he plays, Catherine’s effete husband, Edgar Linton, Heathcliff's sickly offspring, Linton, the old man Earnshaw who precipitates the whole tragedy by introducing into his house the boy Heathcliff, a cuckoo in the nest, and Joseph the ancient retainer.
Nick Figgis modulates easily from the drunken Hindley, who brutalises Heathcliff, to his son, Hareton, who in turn is brutalised by Heathcliff; and the splendid Kate Ambler has equal facility in emotionally charging Isabella Linton, Frances and the ubiquitous Nelly Dean.
An exceptional feature is the interpolation of some of Emily's most haunting and profoundly moving poems, beautifully set to music by Richard Taylor and sung in parts by the cast. Nothing perhaps could better bring home to the audience the atmospheric tumult of Wuthering Heights, the product of Emily's fevered imagination.
Tautly directed by Sue Dunderdale, this ambitious adaptation of an English classic shouldn't be missed. (Andrew Liddle)
Thornton’s fast and furious adaptation was premiered in 2003 with its distinctive format of an omnipresent cast of five. In 2007, it died a death at the hands of director Sue Dunderdale in unquestionably the worst repertory production of the past decade at York Theatre Royal, a ribald show more doomed than the lovers.AboutMyArea has a Jane Eyre-inspired short story called After Jane Eyre, written by Mike Horgan.
Now Mr and Mrs Godber are giving it the chance to rise from the grave, still as Five Go Mad On the Yorkshire Moors, and with the USP of a “host of TV faces performing an iconic Yorkshire love story”. [...]
Once they have entered in a portentous babble of overlapping voices – dressed as if for a Mummers’ play – the five never leave the stage (save for the interval). Godber’s intense production takes the form of a piece of storytelling, not far removed from the reportage style of Greek drama, with initially brief flurries of heightened drama that gradually grow longer, less stilted and more brutal as the night progresses.
This is typically economical and brisk theatre in Hull Truck tradition but it struggles to build up a head of dramatic steam in the first half. Meanwhile, the use of the cast for sound effects has a collective impact, unlike the stylised, no-contact violence that is too humorously redolent of a touring Victorian melodrama.
“There is a lot of death and illness in the play and we need to get that across,” says Godber. “The relationships, the way that people are with each other, is also very harsh. In that way, the text is very modern.”
Carbolic soap opera, you might say, but alas Wuthering Heights still doesn’t hit the heights. (Charles Hutchinson) (Read the full review here).
So if Jackass director Jeff Tremaine dares to douse her with a spray hose, then she will retaliate by getting another one of her father’s idiot friends to piss in the man’s beer. And something tells me this child is reading Jane Eyre or doing complicated math equations in her room while those jackasses snicker over Tom & Jerry reruns. (Karen Valby)And finally we can't help but mention a guest post on England and the Brontës that we contributed to the Passport feature of Paperback Dolls.
Let's begin with a magazine that includes an article about Brontë country:Country Walking, July 2007 IssueThe Telegraph talks a little about the Wuthering Heights performances in York:
The new issue of Country Walking is just hitting the newsstands now, and it's a cracker! (...)
Wuthering walks
Discover more of the brooding Brontë moors on new access land...
John Godber's wife, Jane Thornton, has had a crack - together with director Sue Dunderdale - at bringing Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to the stage using only five actors.We don't know what Claire Vigee, the self-proclaimed Princess Diana scholar in Jennifer Vandever's The Brontë Project, would think if she read the following article published in The New Yorker:
Given the impossibility of the task, she's done tolerably well. The story is fluidly rendered, with effective bridging use being made of the author's poems as choral songs.
But do Joel Fry's Heathcliff and Jessica Harris's Cathy move and thrill us? With so much hectic business around them - not a jot. (Dominic Cavendish)
Monday, June 23, 1997. The Four Seasons, East Fifty-second Street, between Lexington and Park. At the invitation of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, lunch with the Princess of Wales. (...)The Buffalo News reviews The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson By Paola Kaufmann. It's well-known that Emily Dickinson was a passionate Brontëite. The origins can be traced back to her own infancy:
And what few people have understood is that Diana’s love for Charles, like everything else about her, was embarrassingly intense. Had she been a chilly opportunist, she might have accommodated the marital arrangement favored by so many of her husband’s friends. But her love was tenacious, desperate, uncompromising. Her temperament was not the sort to take a husband’s infidelity in stride. How could Charles have known that the demure deb he married would turn out to harbor a cache of emotions out of Emily Brontë? (Tina Brown)
The girls [Lavinia and Emily] and Austin [their brother] grew up in a cold home. Their father was a bit of a tyrant and their mother emotionally inaccessible. But the children were happy, sustained by a rich, imaginative life together, which they modeled after the lives of the Bronte children. They created their own Gondal kingdoms and acted out scenes from Jane Eyre.Incidentally, the latest issue of Brontë Studies includes an article by Wendy Anne Powers tracing the similarities between the Brontë and the Dickinson households as well as looking into the influence the Brontës - Charlotte and Emily in particular - had over Emily Dickinson.
Emily especially enjoyed being the madwoman in the attic. (Sally Fiedler)
And in a completely different league, and possibly sub-genre, is Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre regarded as highly as the Brönte novel, which extends beyond the original in terms of politics as well as timeframe and plot.The Times Word Watching of a couple of days ago included the following definition:
CABA a. A type of coffee b. The Phoenician letter CB c. A handbagAnd today in the answers we find a Charlotte Brontë reference:
Caba (c) A small satchel or handbag. Adaptation of the French cabas, a basket or panier. Charlotte Bronte, The Professor, 1845: “Day-pupils, tearing down their cloaks, bonnets, and cabas from the wooden pegs.” (Philip Howard)Categories: Books, Journals, References, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights
More reviews for the York Theatre Royal's production of Wuthering Heights. The Times gives three stars out of five:Jane Thornton’s deft, economical adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel remains a period piece. And yet a case could almost be made for Sue Dunderdale’s pacey production of it to be seen and studied by anyone interested in the psychology of contemporary adolescents. After all, aren’t young people today just as temperamental, conflicted in their emotions and wilful in their decisions as those depicted by Brontë in the mid-19th century? (...)Talking about theatrical adaptations of Brontë novels, Imogen Russell Williams posts on The Guardian's Theatre Blog about transferring popular novels to the stage and describes Polly Teale's Jane Eyre like this:
(...)Dunderdale puts a talented young cast of five through some vigorous paces. The actors play their parts and further the plot as narrators, slipping between multiple duties with relative simplicity and assurance. Lorna Ritchie’s attractive split-level set allows them plenty of room to manoeuvre. With its hard, horizontal lines offset by a double staircase, it functions almost like a playground upon which they enact a complicated, sober game of let’s pretend.
Perhaps inevitably, given the small size of the cast, some muddiness arises in the second act as Brontë’s tangled, troubled tale tumbles into the next generation. A family tree might have come in handy just to keep track of who begat whom.
That’s not all that’s missing here. Harris makes a fine Cathy. You believe that this spirited and, frankly, selfish girl would die for love. Fry’s slouching, laid-back Heathcliff is no match for her. He’s uncouth and sulky but not, as described in the script, fierce and wolfish. The actor simply hasn’t enough strength of presence to help lift the show to the higher levels of feeling to which it aspires. (Donald Hutera)
There have been some outstanding adaptations of books for the stage. Polly Teale's brilliant version of Jane Eyre, which envisaged Bertha Rochester as Jane's dangerous, sensual alter ego, is one.Bertha also appears on The Minnesota Women's Press that unveils another interesting Brontë reference. This is an article about lesbian writer's communities in Minnesota:
But three writers we spoke with are members of a local writing group called Bertha, which began in the 1980s. Writer Morgan Grayce Willow, whose poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, explained, "It's named for Bertha Rochester, the 'Madwoman in the Attic' referred to in the seminal feminist critical work of the same name ... Bertha Rochester being, of course, the mad wife of Rochester in 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Brontë. Hers is the dark tale that's hidden, yet nurtured, which eventually, inevitably surfaces as it must." (Nancy Hedin)
An engraved plaque recalls the words of Charlotte Bronte: “There’s no use in weeping, Though we are condemned to part: There’s such a thing as keeping A remembrance in one’s heart…” (Patrick Sherman)The words belong to her poem Parting.
On the other hand, I’m happy enough to obsess about the greatness of a groundbreaking television series [The Sopranos] and the parallels between the last episode’s shocking sign-off and Charlotte Bronte’s brilliant and mostly overlooked Villette (any of you agree?) and not at all embarrassed to discuss it.We haven't seen the episode... but if anybody can enlighten us, please do it.
Unless explicitly said
