Quintessentially English

London Theatre reviews Wuthering Heights. The Musical Workshop at The Turbine Theatre.

Audiences at the Turbine Theatre were either treated or subjected to just over forty-five minutes of musical numbers and spoken dialogue from a show currently envisaged to be two hours long in performance time (stick an interval in somewhere, and it’s two hours and twenty minutes total).

From what I could tell, there doesn’t seem to be any radical departure either from the novel’s main narrative points, although it is told from various characters’ perspectives, rather than from Nelly, the main narrator in the novel. The manner in which musical numbers begin in the show follows the musical theatre convention of arising out of such an overwhelming expression of emotion that a song inevitably starts. Heathcliff (Carl Spencer) could have been more menacing: when he orders the servants about, it is like a petulant child who wants a lollipop and wants it Right Now rather than the terrifying rage that not only befits the character but would make for a strong and memorable dramatic effect.

There is some sprightly choreography, but occasionally it proved to be distracting, particularly during a rather beautiful four-part harmony between Heathcliff, Edgar Linton (Luke Bayer), Edgar’s sister Isabella (Natalie Elliott) and Edgar’s wife Cathy (Lizzie Lister). I suppose in a full production the movements would work well with, for instance, projections of moving images, or a set with a revolve. Or both at once.

As this workshop performance contained extracts from the full musical, it cannot be assumed the material presented was entirely in chronological order: it would not surprise me if there were flashback scenes in there somewhere. The initial relatively high energy numbers quickly give way to more reflective tunes and melodies. This isn’t problematic in itself – after all, what would be the point in a big jazz hands dance routine to portray the death of a woman after childbirth – but I would hope to see a little more variety in musical styles in the full-length version.

Bayer’s Edgar is appropriately well-spoken, and softly spoken at that: the production seems to want the audience to work out for themselves whether Cathy is ultimately more drawn to Heathcliff, her first love, or Edgar, given the sheer differences between the two men. Whether this is just another musical with a love triangle remains to be seen. But it has potential, and the songs more often than not drive the story forward. This is an opportunity to bring to life a famous story in a fresh and innovative way, and I wish the creative team well as their journey with this musical continues. (Chris Omaweng)

The Atlantic discusses women and indifference/cynicism at length.

But Charlotte Brontë writes with freedom; she is not afraid of the world, like a boy who has never been to school, like a young home creature, full of loves and hatreds, but all of them free — her own and unimposed. Yet a woman writing of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review said that, if the author were a woman, she must be one who had forfeited all claim to respect from her own sex. There was the union feeling: the resentment against one who laid herself open to misinterpretation; the desire to break her in, to teach her the rules; and the envy of her unbroken spirit, which could express itself in terms of beauty and passion without asking, ‘What will the world think of me?’ (A. Clutton-Brock)

That's the infamous Elizabeth Rigby, of course.

The New Statesman features I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour.

Aided by the jingoistic nostalgia of the colonial community in which she lived, Rhys developed a fantasy of a snow-laden England full of brightly coloured trains. She was bitterly disappointed when she arrived in a drab, grey country in 1907, where she was punished for taking hot baths and other girls at her boarding school mocked her Caribbean accent. (This was exacerbated as they were studying Jane Eyre, in which Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Mr Rochester’s attic, was a white Creole. The experience would indirectly lead to the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’sprequel about Mason’s life before the attic.) (Anna Leszkiewicz)

The Conversation reviews Eleanor Limprecht's novel The Coast.

The Bildungsroman genre adds yet another layer, as the novel dramatises Alice’s development from childhood to adulthood. Charlotte Brontë’s famous coming of age novel Jane Eyre (1847) is particularly resonant. When Alice forges a friendship with 12 year old Greta, a tuberculosis patient, it parallels Jane Eyre’s bond with the consumptive Helen Burns, as these relationships develop while in captivity. (Suzie Gibson)

Metal Planet Music reviews Ms Amy Birks's new album In Our Souls.

Quintessentially English, the lush arrangements and pastoral motifs that fill this new album bring with them a heady nostalgia that perfectly distills the atmosphere of the era of the Brontë sisters, something that was a real driving force here.

With lyrics taken from a poem by Charlotte Brontë, the opening self-titled ‘In Our Souls’ is a stripped back thing of wondrous gossamer-like beauty, the piano and cello distinctive voices in of themselves. As with the rest of the album, there is a real sense of time and place evoked as the pastel shades of the music are dappled with the hope of new dawns and a gentler spirit. (Paul Monkhouse)

The Sydney Morning Herald on youngsters discovering Kate Bush:

She doesn’t tweet. She doesn’t post on Instagram. Her breakthrough single – sung from the perspective of a ghost haunting an English moor – is 45 years old.

But recently Kate Bush has snuck back into the pop culture mainstream, confirming that she remains one of the most influential musicians of all time. [...]

In a BBC documentary to mark Bush’s return to live shows in 2014, comedian and actor Steve Coogan got closest to identifying what sets Bush apart from almost all popular musicians.

“Byron once said of Keats, Keats writes about he imagines, I write about what I live,” Coogan noted.

“Most rock and roll people write about their lives in someway and Kate Bush is more like Keats in that she writes about what she imagines.”

That Coogan put Bush in the context of two of the world’s greatest poets should not be a surprise. Bush has been borrowing from literature since she emerged as a 19-year-old with her take on Emily Brontë’s 175-year-old novel, Wuthering Heights. (Shane Wright)

The Brontës, Monarchy And The Platinum Jubilee on AnneBrontë.org.