Winifred Gérin - a talk in Bath

 

Review of the book here

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Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights - at The West Yorkshire Playhouse

Solomon Glave as Heathcliff

Andrea Arnold's brutally realistic take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights made waves in 2011 and is still making waves today, from the responses of the seventy or so in the audience of the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse last night - which consisted mainly of one enthusiastic school party. It was an excellent choice to stimulate debate and raise questions, especially if A Levels are in mind.

An impressively knowledgeable panel was assembled on the stage under the title Brontës on Stage and Screen, to discuss artists' approaches to Brontë adaptations. Linda Marshall-Griffiths spoke about her reading of Villette and the way it influenced her interpretation of it, David Nixon, Artistic Director of Northern Ballet, said that he turned back to the original novel frequently during the process of creating a dance version, Nancy Meckler from Shared Experience recalled her wildly successful collaborations with Polly Teale and Michael Lawrence, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, spoke eloquently about Andrea Arnold's methods and motivations, and the way the film attacked existing conventions on how classical literature was represented on screen.


Read the review on this blog from five years ago

Watch the official trailer here:

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Review - Villette at the West Yorkshire Playhouse

Review by Richard Wilcocks

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, which was recognised by knowledgeable readers in nineteenth century Brussels as a close parallel for what actually happened when its author was teaching cosseted Catholic girls in the Pennsionat, is not generally esteemed for its plot, but for its exquisite characterisations and the way the shy, repressed, unmarried and fiercely Protestant central character Lucy Snowe gives vent to her thoughts and emotions throughout the novel. It is outstanding in Victorian literature for its psychological intensity and its honest scrutiny of female consciousness.

There are few dramatic possibilities in it, compared to Jane Eyre, but it has, apparently, been successfully adapted for radio. Stage and film versions have been sparse in number and unmemorable. Therefore, the version scripted by Linda Marshall-Griffiths for the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse as part of its current Brontë Season was keenly anticipated by many, especially people who have read the novel. On the night I saw it, most of the Parsonage staff were there. There had been a few clichéd journalistic comments previously along the lines of “Brontë purists might not like this…” because this version is set in the future. The summary of the new version sounded promisingly interesting, and Linda Marshall-Griffiths is undoubtedly bold, brave and imaginative. In her own words:

“In re-imagining Villette, I asked myself who is the invisible woman now, who would she be in the future? I began thinking of a clone – easily disposed of, created like a worker-ant, identical and made purely to work. A clone that survived a pandemic that killed her two identical sisters. As Charlotte Brontë used to catch glimpses of what she thought was her sisters in paintings and crowds, my Lucy Snowe is haunted by her own face and the past that both terrorises and holds her. I moved the setting of Villette onto an archeological dig in the future. Lucy Snowe flees her past to become part of a team looking for the bones of the Lady of Villette – a survivor herself, she may hold the key to an ebola-like virus…”  (from the YYP leaflet)

In the event, this play would have been most easily followed by those Brontë purists, the ones in spotless white perhaps, the ones who could compare the characters in the novel with those on stage and follow the storyline, which on the whole adheres to the original pattern. There are just five actors on stage (theatre economics of course), and much has been cut – inevitably. For example Ginevra Fanshawe, here ‘Gin’ (and Polly) is played by Amelia Donkor as a hedonistic dancer and slinky party-goer who prefers to go to the Day of the Dead celebrations rather than hang around in a boring laboratory.

Day of the Dead? Is there a Mexican connection? Is it a linking reference to the bones of the Lady of Villette in the onstage archeological trench? Not clear. It is just one of the things which lead to possible confusion, because the play is hard to get to grips with and occasionally incoherent. Disbelief is not easily suspended. The characters are sketchy and do not develop: Beck, for example, the equivalent of Madame Beck, Charlotte Brontë’s version of the sly wife of the man she loved, is played simply as a kind of workplace bully with an obsession for surveillance by a very under-used Catherine Cusack. Nana Amoo-Gottfried gives us the makings of a good, amiable John Bretton, and should also have been offered more material through which to display his talents.

Amelia Donkor (Gin) and Laura Elsworthy (Lucy Snowe)

After the first quarter of an hour or so, when I was wondering whether this was something out of Doctor Who, Laura Elsworthy, playing Lucy Snowe, was filling me with admiration for her strenuous efforts to portray a journey out of repression and into the realm of love, but she became wearing after a while, especially towards the end of the over-long first half, when she is placed at a raised front corner and engages directly with the audience. As an actor, she must have had some problems getting into the mind of one of three identical clones created by a scientist father (her two sisters, named Esme and Ashe, are dead) or showing that she has real sparks of humanity. Elsworthy does her best with what she is given, but her clunky, awkward utterances, her jerky movements and her lengthy agony-stricken diatribes, delivered expressionist-style, are just too much. And where did that Catholic priest come from? A dream? Mexico?

The second half gave some relief. Lucy became much more human, and the audience even laughed as she sat on a blanket and opened a picnic basket with the gauche Paul (Philip Cairns) to participate in a comically awkward conversation, perhaps the best part of the play. Neither of the characters knew what a picnic was, they had previously admitted, but the basket was to hand and they soon found out.

The admirable boldness of the playwright’s vision made this production watchable. On the night I saw it, a group of what seemed to be sixth formers were chatting noisily afterwards. They had not read the original and confessed to being confused, but they liked the play as a strange puzzle – and they were most intrigued by the enigmatic ending. It might make a good television version one day.

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Jessie Burton, Grace McCleen and little books

Isabel Stirk writes:

Quite a few years ago I purchased a replica set of toy soldiers from the museum shop at the Parsonage for my godson. He enjoyed many hours of imaginative play with them - there were make believe battles, disasters and a few wore a set of badly made uniforms made by yours truly!

Nearly two hundred years earlier Branwell Brontë’s original toy soldiers were having adventures of their own, written about in books the Brontë children made themselves which were less than thirteen centimetres square. The hand writing was proportionately small which created no difficulty for the children as they were all- Charlotte the most- short sighted.  These little books have always fascinated visitors to the museum and have played a big part in this year’s exhibition, curated by Tracy Chevalier, Charlotte Great and Small.

On Saturday evening (10 September), in Haworth, an appreciative audience heard Tracy Chevalier talking to two writers who have both written about miniatures.

Jessie Burton spoke about her debut novel, The Miniaturist, which is set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, and how she was inspired by a visit to the Rijksmuseum. Her novel is based on a doll’s house she saw there which had belonged to the wife of a silk merchant- Petronella Oortman - who had furnished it lavishly. It was interesting to learn that Burton herself had been given a miniature writing desk by a friend on which was placed a tiny replica book with the title Jane Eyre to be joined later by another tiny book Burton’s own The Miniaturist.

Grace McCleen, who is writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for 2016, said she had always been interested in miniaturisation, and making miniatures, sometimes up to fourteen hours at a time, had helped her through a period of illness. She too spoke about, and read from, her own award winning debut novel The Land of Decoration. The narrator is a ten year old girl who, with her father, is a member of a fundamentalist sect who lives in a small town. To escape from the bullying she has to endure she recreates the town as an elaborate model in her bedroom.

The usual questions and answers followed and there were differing theories put forward as to why people create miniatures and why the Brontë children created their own miniature books. In the case of the Brontës I feel it may have been an escape and as they followed their heroes in their adventures they had found for a short time their own sanctuary.  For a brief period they were free from the harsh realities of their lives. Lives where they had no mother, they had lost two sisters and lived within sight of a crowded graveyard. They would hear frequently the tolling of the church bell heralding that their father would soon be conducting the funeral of yet another Haworth resident who had succumbed to the ignorance, disease and privation which abounded in the hill top village at that time. 

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