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Tuesday, July 05, 2022

The Conversation reviews the Sydney Theatre Company's adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
“You know when it’s the autumn of 1827, and you’re sitting in a church, having the wrong sort of existential crisis?” Gilbert Markham (Remy Hii) asks the audience at the beginning of Emme Hoy’s compelling theatrical adaptation of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
He is reminding us we are in a period drama – something easy to forget with this very modern-feeling tale of addiction, domestic abuse, child custody battles and female artistic self-reclamation. [...]
Hoy’s more dexterous handling of the novel’s shifting perspectives runs the two marriage plots together, alternating between Gilbert and Helen’s burgeoning romance and Helen and Huntingdon’s collapsing marriage, scene for scene.
Lindenhope and Huntingdon’s estate are represented by a single, morphing set, with the revolving stage physically transposing characters between settings. Elizabeth Gadsby’s responsive stage design accentuates the unsettling parallels between the behaviours of the two male leads, whose love languages seem equally underwritten by gendered power.
There is something unsettling in the male leads. Sydney Theatre Company/Prudence Upton
Doubled roles, including the dazzling Nikita Waldron as the coquettish, fortune-chasing Eliza Millward of Lindenhope and Annabella Willmont, Huntingdon’s mistress, and Steve Rodgers as both the village’s (here wonderfully comic) Reverend Millward and Huntingdon’s sleazy comrade Walter Hargrave (referred to, in one of Anne Brontë’s most brilliant put downs, as “a glow worm amongst worms”) underline this reciprocity.
Perhaps the most interesting pairing is Anthony Taufa’s combined portrayal of Frederick Lawrence and Huntingdon’s crony Lord Lowborough. Both are represented as men struggling with legacies of bullying.
As Hoy’s script emphasises, there’s a bit of each character in the other: heroes and villains are not so easily disentangled within a culture of toxic masculinity.
Hoy and director Jessica Arthur are gifted translators of the novel to the stage, and of its proto-feminist message to our post #metoo moment.
Frequent nods to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s metatheatrical dark comedy Fleabag bring to light both the anachronistic directness of Anne Brontë’s original and its complex reflexivity.
Yet ultimately, Hoy is more optimistic than Brontë, handing out happier endings all round. (Vanessa Smith)
The New Yorker reviews Miranda Seymour’s biography of Jean Rhys I Used to Live Here Once.
It was to Vaz Dias that Rhys first spoke of the project that was to resurrect her reputation: a reframing of “Jane Eyre” from the point of view of Mr. Rochester’s mad Creole wife. It would draw on Rhys’s childhood in Dominica to imagine the woman’s early life in Jamaica, her arranged marriage to the abusive Mr. Rochester, and the events that led to her confinement in his attic. Rhys worked on the book in her sixties and seventies, in precarious health and devotedly coaxed by two editors, Diana Athill and Francis Wyndham. Eventually published in 1966 as “Wide Sargasso Sea,” her fifth and final novel became a key text in feminist and post-colonial literature. [...]
In 1990, Jean Rhys became the subject of a huge and ardently engaged biography by Carole Angier. Seymour is respectful of Angier’s achievement, but discreetly takes a different approach. Angier deals with Rhys possessively and pedagogically, as if psychoanalyzing a brilliant and difficult family relation. Rhys is called Jean throughout, and Angier concludes that “Jean” probably suffered from a borderline personality disorder that blocked her from developing “a complete, autonomous self.” The novels are read intelligently but romantically, as episodes in self-analysis; “Wide Sargasso Sea” is judged Rhys’s masterpiece, because it allowed her to achieve “complete artistic control over her demon of self-pity.” [...]
Indeed, you can make a case that “Voyage in the Dark” is Rhys’s great post-colonial novel, rather than the stagier “Wide Sargasso Sea,” with its gothicky dramatic monologues. [...]
True to form, Rhys grumbled that the celebrity “Wide Sargasso Sea” brought her was burdensome and overwhelming, but Seymour’s biography is a testament to how triumphantly, against odds inflicted and self-inflicted, she succeeded in arranging her “little life” into a writing life whose dimensions we are still happily measuring. She lacked hope, but never courage. (James Wood)
Yorkshire Live recommends filming locations from The Railway Children Return worth visiting and one of them is
Brontë Parsonage Museum
You can visit the doctor’s house, which was shot in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in nearby Haworth. The building was built in 1779 and is where the Brontë sisters - Emily, Charlotte and Anne - spent much of their lives. (Nuray Bulbul)
MovieWeb ranks Laurence Olivier's best films and Wuthering Heights makes it to number 2.
Wuthering Heights
William Wyler’s adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel, Wuthering Heights was released in 1939. In true Hollywood style, the film slashes many of the original book’s chapters and crops characters and central plot aspects from the movie, however, Oliver’s Heathcliff was praised. More significantly, it serves as a great adaptation of the characters, capturing the drama of the novel perfectly. (Andrew McGrotty)
Both The Litt Librarian and A book and chai review What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remix by Tasha Suri.

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