Never a false step in Wise Children's Wuthering Heights

We have several reviews of Wise Children's Wuthering Heights today. The Times gives it 5 stars:

Published in 1847, the year before she died, and set on the Brontë siblings’ beloved Yorkshire moors, the novel is commonly read in adolescence, when one’s sensibilities may be particularly susceptible to its intoxicating highs and lows.

The director Emma Rice
did just that, and Brontë’s book left a lasting mark on her. The latest production by her company Wise Children is her adaptation of it, and it’s a corker — superbly cast, delivered with gusto and evincing the kind of rough-hewn yet fluid and economical theatrical invention (including live music, dancing, puppetry) that enhances the story’s dark, grim grip and locates pockets of welcome humour within it. Lasting nearly three hours, this intensely absorbing show (a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, the National Theatre and York Theatre Royal) deepens as it unfolds.

The performance commences with the crack of a whip and a mad cackle that together signal a storm. There is certainly no dearth of tempestuous feelings in the saga that follows as Rice and a 12-strong ensemble trace, with sometimes startling clarity, a legacy of elemental desire and monumental pain spanning two generations. Their take on the haunted bond between Cathy (played by the abrasively charismatic Lucy McCormick as a lifelong wild child) and the foundling Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, whose telling characterisation is like a resolutely unforgiving bruise) works as a compelling and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny romantic melodrama. Yet enjoyable as it is as a knowing period piece, Rice’s astute script and staging are also shot through with thorny, relevant ideas about gender, class and racial divides. [...]

Perhaps Rice’s most inspired decision was to have a handful of actors embody the moor itself. Led with warmth and generosity by Nandi Bhebhe, “The Moor” is chorus and narrator, helping us to keep track of who’s who in Brontë’s convoluted plot and acting for several characters as a sounding board.

And it is Brontë’s characters — abused or abusive, needy and conflicted — who count the most here. Plaudits to Sam Archer (agile and droll), Tama Phethean (brutish then pathetic), Witney White (vibrant) and especially Katy Owen (utterly delightful as Cathy’s hyper-silly sister-in-law and Heathcliff’s mewling male offspring) for making strong impressions in multiple roles. But then everyone involved is reaching for the heights in this emotionally epic entertainment. (Donald Hutera)

Daily Mail gives it 5 stars too.

A giggly, ungodly ragamuffin wanders on to the stage, opens a clothbound book and cracks a whip — expertly — breaking loose a hellish storm.

Once again, director Emma Rice has thrown away all the rulebooks and harnessed the beating heart and slippery soul of Emily Bronte's unwieldy gothic monster, Wuthering Heights, in a wildly imaginative, exhilarating piece of theatre.

Gone is the housekeeper narrator, Nelly. 

Instead an all-singing, all-dancing chorus sounds every note of the novel, raising it into the realms of Greek tragedy and making a magnificent character of the Yorkshire Moors — which stretch from the haunted, forbidding crags of Wuthering Heights to the sunlit pastures of Thrushcross Grange.

Led by Nandi Bhebhe, majestic in a crown of twigs, the Moors howl up a hurricane, warning: 'Be careful what you seed.' 

Lucy McCormick's compelling Catherine dominates the first half, torn between two lovers: the soulmate of Ash Hunter's brooding, untameable Heathcliff but drawn to the softness of pampered, pampering Edgar Linton (Sam Archer).

Words pour out of her until finally, as a Tina Turner-like rock goddess, she sings: 'I am earth, I am sky.'

The story emerges with remarkable clarity. Characters are introduced, their names chalked on slates which become gravestones on their deaths.

Rice finds comedy where there was none: a character arrives in a deerstalker, blown in by the storm, leaning at an acute angle to suggest the hurtling wind.

A skull with ears fixed on the blade of a scythe becomes a hilariously savage puppet hound. 

As Heathcliff's wife, Isabella, Katy Owen flits with elastic daintiness; as her son, she is reborn as the lisping sibling of Just William's Violet Elizabeth Bott.

Inevitably perhaps, with Catherine gone, the intensity slips in the second half, but with young Cathy finding happiness, Rice embraces sunshine and hope.

Just as the books fastened at the ends of bendy sticks conjure the quivering birds on the Moor, so Rice has given glorious dramatic wings to Wuthering Heights. (Patrick Marmion)

The Fix Magazine gives it 4 out of 5 stars.

Her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel of love, revenge, class and greed is no exception; this is a relentlessly entertaining piece, delivered with such brio that it easily masters a potentially onerous three hour running time.

The ingenuity of Rice’s presentation is clear from the moment Mr Lockwood, a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, negotiates a windswept Yorkshire Moor and pays a visit to his landlord Heathcliff (Ash Hunter), who resides at the eponymous stately home. A large screen in the background depicts dark clouds and changing conditions, a live band provide a faultless and unremittingly moody sense of drama, a manoeuvrable set of doors brilliantly, and economically, denote the shifting between locations, and manipulated branches and sound effects nicely evoke the ferocity of the storm. [...]

Elsewhere, McCormick is fantastic as the increasingly unhinged and yearning Catherine. As well as a dynamic singing voice – the second act momentarily turns into a music gig as she belts out some Courtney Love style angsty rock – her manic, heavily kohl-eyed expressions convincingly depict her character’s descent into madness. Also, the live band are a performance highlight; Sid Goldsmith on guitar, Nadine Lane on drums and percussion and Renell Shaw on bass provide a soundtrack – one moment a subtle, simmering backdrop, the next a high-register production number – that never makes a false step. (Scott Hammond)

What'sOnStage is less enthusiastic, giving it 3 out of 5 stars.

It ticks off the classic Rice tropes that those of us who admire her have fallen for, puppetry, gender, and colour-blind casting, songs, some unexpected production choices. Yet it lacks the originality of her best works: the transcendence of A Midsummer Nights Dream, the unexpected chocolatey sweetness of Romantics Anonymous, the sheer love breaking beyond the buttoned-up society of Brief Encounter: here nothing takes you by surprise or throws a different perspective on the piece. Rice may be a victim of her success, doomed if she doesn't vault ever higher poles. For completists, it feels inessential. For those new to her work or wanting to watch a stage production that ticks off every narrative beat, this may read better.

What Rice does do very well is bring the elemental wildness of the novel to the stage. The love story of Heathcliff and Cathy, brought together by erotic force, broken apart by class and society is big on atmosphere and in act one particularly there are moments she is supported in this by Lucy McCormick's Cathy, bringing the wide-eyed edge of her Post Popular character to one of literature's most famous wild children. With her doe-eyes and unruly hair, she brings a sense of innocence and danger to all her stage work, and she plays it up to the hilt here, a girl lost in a world of love and eroticism slightly beyond her comprehension. When she grabs a microphone and wails like a banshee, wind machine throwing her hair back, we see the theatre that Rice at her best can produce. There just aren't enough of that here.

Brontë's novel is a tricky ask for actors, requiring them to age from childhood into middle age and adapt from fire to curdled middle-aged disappointment. Ash Hunter's Heathcliffe is thrilling in the first half, an orphan thrown into a class that he can't quite break into until spurned by love and family he returns a gentleman avenger. However, in the second half, he struggles to show the vulnerability beyond the ice-cold revenge, the man who "cares too much, and yet cares not at all." Whether it's Brontë's writing or the production as a whole, the second half of hauntings and a slight tinge of madness doesn't quite land. (Kris Hallett)

The Stage gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

The production doesn’t overlook the abusive nature of Heathcliff’s relationship with Cathy, persisting even after death with his insistence that she never rest – he essentially forces her to haunt him – but it shies away from the full horror of this, as if a little too susceptible to the romantic power of Emily Brontë’s novel.
Nor can the production fully counteract the novel’s imbalance, the hole that Cathy makes in the narrative after she expires, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. After the theatrical drought of the past year and a half, Rice’s particular brand of theatrical magic is incredibly welcome, like wine after a period of abstinence. (Natasha Tripney)

Offaly Express and other Irish news outlets feature Pauline Clooney's novel Charlotte and Arthur.

What was to become Charlotte and Arthur, the novel, started life as a PhD subject. But - following the guidance of her advisor to ‘get it out before someone else writes the story’, Pauline left the academic programme just before lockdown and turned her attention full-time to the novel. [...]

Pauline, whose mother is from Banagher, noted that the couple’s wedding and Irish honeymoon has received scant attention from biographers.

“We have six letters she wrote from Ireland, so using those six letters, and what Arthur wrote, I put an itinerary together of those trip,” she said.

The book imagines the honeymoon trip from Charlotte’s point of view, to reveal something about who she was. The author also juxtaposed the idea of the honeymooners taking a trip around the country, including Cork and Trinity College in Dublin, with the reality and poverty of post-Famine Ireland.

“They spent nearly a week in Banagher with his relatives,” said Pauline. She says that the work of Alan Adamson, a Canadian academic with links to that family, provided her with invaluable biographical material with which to flesh out the story.

“I dip into a bit of Irish history at the time as they travel around. As Arthur was an alumni of Trinity, they visit Trinity when in Dublin, the Book of Kells and the Long Room feature in teh book. I’m not sure if they went to the Botanic Gardens, but I couldn’t resist a visit.”

Charlotte’s happy marriage was to be cut short by her death from pregnancy complications the spring after her honeymoon.

Arthur cared for the Brontë patriarch, Patrick, after her passing - her three siblings had predeceased her - but returned to Offaly after Patrick’s death, when he didn’t get the Haworth Parsonage incumbency he had expected.

He married his cousin Mary-Anna - ‘she always had a romantic fondness for Arthur’, believes Pauline - and lived out his days as a small farmer in Banagher, even while the Brontës’ reputations grew in the years after their deaths.

“The sadness of it is that he’s not buried with Charlotte, he’s buried with Mary-Anna in the churchyard of St Paul’s in Banagher,” said Pauline.

The Portlaoise native describes her novel as ‘a real labour of love’. “In one sense, there’s a relief as well that I’ve done it and it’s out there now and I should really move on,” she said.

Pauline says the reception from friends and fans, particularly in Newbridge and Portlaoise, has been extremely supportive.

“I’m also getting some nice responses from people who are Brontë enthusiasts. One of the first reviews said that it is addressing a gap in their story which has never been fictionalised before, and barely documented.” (Laura Coates)

The Times reviews The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood.

(When Dorothy hears people singing Wuthering Heights at a karaoke night, “it sounded like feral cats being raped — in a fun way”.). (John Self)

The Concord Insider reviews Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia.

This book embodies the strongest gothic characteristics usually seen in works from the likes of Emily Brontë, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson. Garcia Moreno gives a fresh take to the genre by imbuing the story with additional unsettling evils not rooted in the supernatural: racism, classism, and the ghosts of colonialism. 

The New York Times looks back on the birth of The New York Times Book Review in 1851 recalling the time when

The second half of the 19th century was filled with riches: [...]

“Villette,” by Charlotte Brontë, was hailed as “a first class work.” (Tina Jordan)

The Telegraph and Argus reports that the Brontë Parsonage will look purple at night for a week for a good cause.

The Rotary Club of Haworth & Worth Valley has teamed up with Haworth Parish Church and the Brontë Parsonage Museum to throw a special light on Haworth during World Polio Day this Sunday.

The Rotarians have gained permission from their partners to bathe both the Church and the world-famous home of the Brontës in the campaign’s colour of purple during every evening for a week when their floodlights are switched on after World Polio Day.

When Rotary and its partners launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, there were 350,000 cases of polio in 125 countries every year.

Great progress against the disease has been achieved since then. Today, polio cases have been reduced by 99.9 per cent, and just two countries continue to report cases of wild poliovirus: Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Rotarians worldwide remain committed to the end.

Ian Park, the Immediate Past President of the Rotary Club of Haworth & Worth Valley, said: “Up until July there were just two cases of wild poliovirus reported in the world, one each in Pakistan and Afghanistan which is amazing given the political situation in that part of the world.

“We want to play our part in raising awareness of the continuing campaign to eliminate this awful disease and we’re grateful to Haworth Church and the Parsonage Museum for their help.” (Mark Stanford)

The Carmen Mola affair in Spanish literature continues being discussed and the Brontës mentioned as writers who hid behind pseudonyms in newspapers such as Financial Times and El sol de México.

Finally, news from the Brontë Society fundraising campaign towards securing the Honresfeld collection:

Our #JustGiving campaign to #SaveTheHonresfieldLibrary is almost half way there, thank you so much. If you can help us cross the finishing line, you can do so here: https://t.co/XJeonvIWFV Thank you all for your support.

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) October 21, 2021