’I need to read the book’

Impact gives 4 1/2 stars to Wise Children’s Wuthering Heights at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal.

The inclusion of a live band played by Sid Goldsmith, Nadine Lee and Renell Shaw was a great addition, as they used their musical talent to capture and translate the mood onstage fittingly, and provided backing for the cast’s amazing vocals. An impromptu rock moment from McCormick was a particularly nice surprise – it was these additions which made the production engaging in its three-hour length. When paired with the brilliant lighting and staging, which was ideal in its simplicity, you could see the hard work of the talented crew behind the scenes really shine.

‘’Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’’ The iconic and well-known quote from the novel, and one with true emotion. Which is what the cast certainly conveyed onstage. I was particularly impressed with Lucy McCormick’s take on Catherine Earnshaw, as you could feel the pain in her performance, and her chemistry with Heathcliff.

On a light-hearted note, Katy Owen’s performance of Isabella Linton and Linton Heathcliff had the audience in stitches at times. For such a serious story, these moments of humour were definitely necessary. Craig Johnson as Dr Kenneth also brought a sprinkle of fun to the show, as well as humorous moments from Jordan Laviniere.

With a standing ovation from the captivated audience, and unfamiliar audience members saying ‘’I need to read the book’’ as they left the theatre, Emma Rice’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights clearly went down a treat. You can catch the production in Nottingham until Saturday! (Amrit Virdi)

The production is also reviewed by Left Lion.

For a novel of around 300 pages this production was long, and I did start to shuffle in my seat towards the end of the 100-minute first half.  However, I was mesmerised by the inventive restaging.  It was full of elements I have seen in productions before, but not altogether. A live band on stage, puppetry, interactions with the audience, singing (from folk to a full-on Kate Bush style rock interlude), dance and plenty of comedy.  Yes, there was comedy!  I’m still not sure how I feel about that in such a dark and violent tale but there was physical, almost slap-stick comedy and some wonderful dialogue.

Katy Owen who played both Isabella Linton and Little Linton is an amazing comic force, I couldn’t take my eyes off her whenever she stepped in the stage.  Agile and acrobatic and with priceless lines like ‘Sometimes I like to slide down the banister because it tickles my tuppence”.  The other stand out performance was from The Moor played by Nandi Bhebhe.  In Rice’s production The Moor is a character who interacts and guides.  Along with the rest of the cast who are all part of the moor at one time or another they act as a kind of Greek Chorus providing narration and comment and plenty of warnings such as ‘Be careful what you seed.’  An apt warning considering that such small acts and words have such dire consequences in this tale.

As mentioned there is music and song in this production, and plenty of it. So, it may not surprise you to know that Heathcliff is played by Liam Tamne of ‘The Voice’ fame. He provides a fine physical and musical performance but is a little too sulky for me.  Catherine, who has varied musical numbers, is played by Lucy McCormick (aka Lucy Muck).  Her non-stop, high-energy performance is no surprise if you look at her musical and experimental theatre credentials, she played an especially manic Catherine. However, despite two strong performances there was no sense of a deep love or passionate torment, just selfishness, grudges and noise. Exhausting to watch at times, I found myself longing for some of the serenity of the novel and it's deserted moorland.

If you love Wuthering Heights for the Bronte language, bonnets and bleak moorland this may not be the production for you. If you are a fan because of the stormy characters, gothic tragedy and like your drama lively then you have come to the right show. (Beverley Makin)

The Reviews Hub gives 2 1/2 stars to I Am No Bird at The McCarthy, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.

The Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough has been supporting its excellent production of Jane Eyre with a series of events making up a Brontë Festival. The only one of these that takes the form of an actual dramatic performance is I Am No Bird, a one-hour reimagined Brontë story by Stute Theatre in association with the Stephen Joseph Theatre and Brontë Parsonage Museum which slots in for five performances at the end of the run of Jane Eyre.

Performed by three talented actor-musicians, it’s pleasant enough, but doesn’t really add much to the Brontë myth, except the information that Emily was a good baker! Similarly, the story of feminine empowerment doesn’t strike new ground, though the selection of some of the worst reviews reminds us that Victorian values were not all they’re cracked up to be. One quotation about the impossibility of women writing forms a neat opening for a song.

The premise for the show is that Sophia Hatfield, playing Charlotte, has recruited Claire-Marie Seddon (Emily) and Emma Swan (Anne). They begin bonneted and demure singing a nice little song and are launched on a series of quotations when Emily decides she’s had enough. Anne eventually admits her dislike for the costumes which are discarded and we are ready for an alternative take – but what should it be?

So we get snippets of Brontë life, reinterpreted imaginatively: Branwell comes clumping in from the pub, made up of a mop and wellies while Seddon makes farting noises on her euphonium; the words of the critics are turned into paper birds which attack Emily. In between times Anne’s phone goes off and Charlotte and Emily argue. Eventually they decide that the place to understand the Brontës is the moorland by the parsonage.

Lisa Cagnacci’s direction is nicely economical, Sophia Simensky’s set a clever mix of 19th century parlour and bird cage. Sophia Hatfield’s music – from hip-hop to folk music – is not especially memorable, but well performed, with accompaniments ranging from fiddle and flute to trumpet and accordion.

Sophia Hatfield – no doubt deliberately – is a bit irritating as Charlotte with her sniffy primness. Claire-Marie Seddon is very much the modern girl, argumentative and full of energy. Emma Swan, spared the confrontations of the other two, is drolly amusing. It’s a noble attempt at a new version of the Brontës, updated and feminist, but it lacks the required sharpness. (Ron Simpson)

A contributor to Church Times writes about visiting the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

When you walk into a pub where the four real ales on offer are called, respectively, Anne, Branwell, Charlotte, and Emily, then you know you are in Brontë country. Mind you, I didn’t need the ales to remind me; for I had come to the King’s Arms in Haworth directly from the Brontë Parsonage Museum. So my mind was full of the brilliance, compassion, and tragedy woven through the personal stories of those astonishing storytellers.

The museum is beautifully laid out, and contains many treasures — not least the desks, pens, quills, notebooks, and manuscripts of Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, from the tiny books that they made when they told stories to and about Branwell’s toy soldiers as children, to the copies, translations, and correspondence that flowed from the huge success of Jane Eyre.

I love standing in the studies of writers I admire, and seeing the very desks on which they wrote. It gives me a kind of happy vertigo: a sense of the finite giving rise to endlessly generative spirals of the infinite. From these small, folding desks flowed the great worlds of the novels, and not just the world of the novel as it was written, but the new world that each new reading of the novel forms in the active imagination of each new reader — all those worlds began here, generated from the single generous act of imagination, engendered faithfully with pen and quill at these little desks.

But, curiously, it was not the rooms of the successful writers that moved me most, but the room of the Brontë who died in disappointment and apparent failure: Branwell, the brilliant son and much-loved brother, on whom such great expectations were laid, and who could not, in the end, bear the burden of them. He had tried careers as an artist and a writer, and, when these seemed to founder, had been a railway clerk and a tutor, and, when even these smaller ambitions failed, he spent his final years almost bedridden, struggling with depression and dependent on alcohol and opium. (Malcolm Guite)

The Telegraph and Argus features Bradford-born writer Alexandra Potter.

As children, my sister and I used to adore visiting the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. We were fascinated by the miniature books written by the sisters, so much so we created our own. (Helen Mead)

Daily O (India) lists '9 female literary characters that are 4x better than their male counterparts' and one of them is

2. EPONYMOUS JANE FROM JANE EYRE 

Written by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre follows the story of Jane, a simple yet courageous girl. Her journey from her aunt's house, Lowood School to Thornfield Hall shows Jane's independece and her wit.

Her refusal to marry Mr Rochester, once she knows that his first wife exists and then her decision to not marry her cousin, St John is remarkable and a true sign of her self-supporting and free-spirited attitude. (Ishita Srivastava)

A columnist from Gulf Today (Arab Emirates) writes about his love of books.

Inspired by the gain, delightfully harvested through my reading of Thomas Hardy, I embraced more books. Some of them — Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Albert Camus’s The Outsider, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — became my inseparable company through thick and thin.  

Words like Dostoevsky’s “ How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature! … And vile is he who calls him vile for that” and Brontë’s “A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though stern for grace” completely revolutionised my interpretation of life and man’s foibles. (Shaadaab S. Bakht)

While a contributor to GoBookMart claims that,

If I have to choose I would always prefer Emily Brontë over Jane Austen. At least I know why Heathcliff was so brutal and savage in Wuthering Heights. (nandini)

The Sydney Morning Herald reviews the novel Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill.

It’s no secret that the Western literary canon is enormously white. Many of the books held in the highest regard are by and about white people, with characters of colour either non-existent or mentioned only in passing, a footnote to the main character’s story.

Rewriting the script to decolonise texts is not new – Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea provided a postcolonial perspective as a prequel to Jane Eyre – but it’s a trend that is growing, as conversations around race, gender and other marginalised experiences come to the fore. (Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen)

The Boston Globe points out something similar in a review of Trust by Hernan Diaz.

Trust takes aim at the roles of fiction in our lives, and in doing so deftly disguises essential elements of literary criticism in these tales of individuals being manipulated by the stories they tell and the stories told about them. Diaz’s most interesting character is Mildred Bevel, a crucial but peripheral figure yet a character worthy of being a protagonist in her own right. Perhaps some author will one day do for her what Jean Rhys in “Wide Sargasso Sea” did for the “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë's “Jane Eyre.” (Buzz Poole)

Tiempo Argentino (Argentina) has a short article on the irony of posthumous literary glory inspired by the sale of Charlotte Brontë's little book.