Podcasts

  • With... Adam Sargant - It's our last episode of series 1!!! Expect ghost, ghouls and lots of laughs as we round off the series with Adam Sargant, AKA Haunted Haworth. We'll be...
    15 hours ago

Friday, November 02, 2018

Friday, November 02, 2018 9:38 am by M. in , , , , , ,    No comments
Bridport & Lyme Regis News talks about the upcoming LipService's performance of Withering Looks in Lyme Regis:
The bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth is being celebrated with a special event at Lyme Regis’s Marine Theatre in November.
Penned by comedians Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding, Withering Looks takes an 'authentic' look at the lives and works of the Brontë sisters.
Peopled with many of the characters we know and love, Maggie and Sue move effortlessly from frock to frock coat, while donning crinolines and flattering bonnets, and sitting at rained-lashed windows in a pale and decorative manner.
Withering Looks won a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award and the Critics’ award for Comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. LipService recently won the Stage Door Foundation award for Excellence. (Joanna Davis)
Henley Standard reviews the ongoing Jane Eyre performances in Bagnor, Newbury:
Now the writer-in-residence at the Watermill Theatre in Bagnor, Danielle Pearson, has created a powerful and very intelligent adaptation of the story that brings all the strength of Brontë’s text to bear to make it gripping and relevant for audiences today.
Director Chloe France has achieved remarkable things with this production, using a small but hugely talented cast to bring the characters and atmosphere of a bleak and socially divisive Yorkshire to life.
A recent graduate from LAMDA, Rebecca Tebbett belied her youth and relatively slender experience with an incredibly accomplished performance as Jane, managing to perfectly convey the vulnerability yet strength of character that the part requires. (...)
Alex Wilson’s thoughtful interpretation of Rochester made it possible for his audience to understand Jane’s attraction to him, and allowed us some sympathy for his predicament in trying to conceal his wife’s mental illness.
His was a superb performance that contrasted well with the other characters he portrayed during the telling of the tale. (Mary Scriven)
New Criterion Magazine (November issue) reviews the new edition of the Oxford Companion to the Brontës:
On the depth of “Wuthering Heights
On Emily Brontë’s classic, occasioned by a new Oxford Companion to the works of the Brontë sisters.
In commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth on July 30, 1818 (d. 1848), Oxford University Press has reissued its Companion to the Brontës, by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith and seven other contributors.1 Dozens of pages of maps, pictures, a section on Dialect and Obsolete Words, a Classified Contents List, and a three-column Chronology (The Lives of the Brontës, Literary and Artistic Events, Historical Events) accompany the nearly six hundred pages of compact, authoritative, and engaging (if frequently esoteric) entries with enormous variations in length. (James Como)
Also in The New Criterion a review of the performances of The Nap at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre:
Her threats are balanced by malapropisms at which the others are terrified to laugh: “I have hope. I am nothing if not an optometrist!,” she exclaims. An associate is “a huge Bronson fan. Emily Bronson, Wuthering Heights?”  (Kyle Smith)
Could the South Pennines become England's first regional park? in Yorkshire Life:
‘In the past it was thought the area was too industrial but we believe that very industrial heritage, including all those mill villages tucked away in the cloughs and valleys, is one of the main reasons we deserve to be recognised as well as for our superb landscape. There is also a very strong artistic tradition here,’ [Helen Noble, chief executive of Pennine Prospects] said. That stretches right back to the Brontë sisters in Haworth, via more modern writers like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall right up to the present day with poet Simon Armitage, whose work is closely connected with Marsden, while artist Ashley Jackson’s watercolours of the bleak, windswept moors have made him one of Britain’s most successful and sought-after landscape painters. (Terry Fletcher)
Dance Magazine is excited with the presence of Cathy Marston's Jane Eyre in the new season of the American Ballet Theatre:
When American Ballet Theatre announced yesterday that it would be adding Jane Eyre to its stable of narrative full-lengths, the English nerds in the DM offices (read: most of us) got pretty excited. Cathy Marston's adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel was created for England's Northern Ballet in 2016, and, based on the clips that have made their way online, it seems like a perfect fit for ABT's Met Opera season. (Jessica Giles)
The Independent and one of those lists.  Ceri Radford and Chris Harvey pick "the 40 best books to read before you die":
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb. CR
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Brontë’s vision of nature blazes with poetry. CH
Daily Mail reviews A Snapshot of Murder by Frances Brody:
As a World War I widow making her way in the world, Kate Shackleton has succeeded in the unlikely role of private detective. Her latest adventure has Kate taking time out to practice photography.
But, as every crime reader knows, a holiday can only be an excuse for the discovery of a dastardly deed. Here, it is the violent death of one of Kate’s party of camera carriers, who are in the Yorkshire Dales to record the public opening of the former home of Emily Brontë.
As jealousies and motives of revenge begin to emerge, Frances Brody skilfully plays on our emotions by signalling the likely guilt of the one person who attracts our sympathy. (Barry Turner)
In a more traditional Daily Mail way we find an article against universities, scholar elitists and evil people in general:
If you have a passion for Emily Brontë and excellent A-level results, by all means do an English degree. But what if you don't? Why waste three years doing something you are only mildly interested in and have never shone at? (Dominic Sandbrook)
Unf's Spinnaker talks about Vanessa Zoltan and how to read a novel as it was a sacred book:
“We believe that by treating things as sacred, you learn how to treat one another as sacred but that it takes practice,” Zoltan said.
As a precursor to the podcast, Zoltan applied these same ideas to her favorite book, “Jane Eyre,” and started a small weekly gathering for people to analyze the characters, their motivations and struggles as if they were reading the Bible, the Torah or the Quran. (Sarah Bethea)
TVOM recommends horror films:
I Walked with a Zombie 1943
 Although not the most well known among these, I Walked with a Zombie – a dark retelling of the novel Jane Eyre – is most certainly the best. (Brian Hadsell)
Springs Advertiser (South Africa) is not very happy with Michael Stewart's Ill Will (and it seems very clear that the reviewer has missed the point by far):
 While struggling through this book, which isn’t badly written or particularly offensive in any way, it constantly struck me that it’s extremely arrogant of Stewart to assume that he has the ability to even attempt to fill in the life of a character created in 1847 buy a far superior writer.
I really didn’t enjoy this book purely because I kept coming back to the notion that he was ruining, rather than enriching, the original tale with his conceited belief that he knows the character and his back story better than the author who created Heathcliff. (Samantha Keogh)
Il Corriere della Sera (in Italian) talks about Madame Bovary:
Emma ama il lusso e l’amore (è in buona compagnia), perché non le sono stati dati gli strumenti per amare altro e ottenerlo. Ma nel scrivere Madame Bovary Flaubert non voleva fare un romanzo femminista (due anni prima, in Francia, era stato pubblicato Jane Eyre di Charlotte Brontë) né tanto meno uno edificante, che terminasse con l’usuale suicidio che toglieva di mezzo le donne “cattive”.  (Valeria Palumbo) (Translation)
Decider informs that Starz will show in November Wuthering Heights 2011. Tish Farrell pots about North Lees Hall. Trust us, we're nerds reviews My Plain Jane. Wicked Reads reviews the new Wuthering Heights derivative Heath by K. Webster & Nikki Ash. Janet Gover (one half with Alison May of Juliet Bell) presents her new Brontë-related novel, The Other Wife. The Brontë Babe Blog reviews the new volume The Lost Manuscripts.

0 comments:

Post a Comment