Private Lives and love letters

The New York Times reviews the latest adaptation of Noël Coward's Private Lives.

An unlikely hodgepodge of names gets dropped in the course of Red Bull Theater’s Short New Play Festival: Virginia Woolf, Rachel Dolezal, Troilus, Cressida, Cervantes, Trump. But the name that gets dropped hardest — dropped in the sense that it all but disappears — is that of the production’s touchstone, Noël Coward.
The eight 10-minute sketches that make up the 10th edition of the festival, which premiered via livestream on Monday evening and will remain available online through Friday, were meant to respond to Coward’s 1930 play “Private Lives,” a comedy of manners polished so bright you can see yourself in it. [...]
That dynamic continues in the remaining plays, two of which, without sampling Coward, at least nod to him in passing. Both “Plague Year” by Matthew Park and “In the Attic” by Jessica Moss pick up his battle-of-the-sexes theme, with women winning the battle decisively. In Park’s play, a resourceful woman in plague-time England (Cooper) must save herself, and her baby girl, from both a domineering husband (Donovan) and a thoughtless lover (Alvarez). Moss takes the theme of novel romantic arrangements even further, mashing “Private Lives” with “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre” (and its stepdaughter, “Wide Sargasso Sea”) into a deliciously silly Pythonesque squib. (Jesse Green)

The Guardian has a series of 'love letters to theatres'. This is artistic director Jeanefer Jean-Charles's :

Before I knew that I would be lucky enough to have a career in theatre, I dreamed of performing on a stage. When my teacher told me about a drama group at the Cockpit theatre in London I instantly joined the intriguingly named Donkey Down Drama Group (why did they call it that?). Rehearsing at the intimate and enchanting Cockpit after school was the highlight of every week, even though the teacher said modern plays would be better for me, as I struggled with my role in a Brontë classic. A bit old-fashioned for me I thought, but how I adored those costumes. Since then I have remained a sucker for a good old costume drama. Now, when lockdown finally finishes, I will have the chance to have black dancers moving in unnatural, 19th-century costumes as they bring to life recently discovered photographs of black Victorians.
Jeanefer Jean-Charles’s Black Victorians is part of Greenwich+Docklands International Festival, which runs from 28 August to 12 September. (Chris Wiegand)

Tor has selected the 8 best 'Twists on Classic Gothic Stories' and one of them is

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys’ explicitly anti-colonialist response to Jane Eyre. The novel follows Antoinette Cosway, a formerly rich Jamaican heiress of Creole descent who eventually becomes the “madwoman” in Mr. Rochester’s attic. Antoinette tells her own story, in which she is not mad at all, but forced into a hopeless situation by her tyrannical English husband, who is not named in the book. As the book unfolds in the days after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, Antoinette’s own racism and the consequences of her family’s choice to be slaveowners form a pivotal point in her downfall.
Rhys, who was born in Dominica, takes a scalpel to an iconic Gothic tale to look at British oppression in the Caribbean, the horror of white supremacy and slavery, and both men’s brutal treatment of women, and the way elite women can trade an illusion of safety to become complicit in the abuse of the lower class.

The Globe and Mail (Canada) features Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek

The phone conversation turned to Mr. Trebek’s love of literature. (He and his wife, Jean, have travelled frequently to Haworth, England, the birthplace of the Brontë sisters, most recently last fall, in what reads in his memoirs like a final pilgrimage.) (Simon Houpt)

Canal Trece (Colombia) features poet Luz Mary Giraldo, who is a fan of Wuthering Heights.

Pero el libro y las voces que la cambiaron para siempre fueron ‘Cumbres borrascosas’ de Emily Brontë y la poesía de Giuseppe Ungaretti, César Vallejo, Blanca Varela, Juan Gelman y Eugenio Montejo. (Andrea Melo Tobón) (Translation)

Libreriamo (Italy) shares the Italian translation of Emily Brontë's poem Love and Friendship.