Villette - re-imagined - at the Leeds Playhouse
Lucy Snowe, perhaps Charlotte Bronte’s most enigmatic heroine watches, encounters and finally experiences life and love in this extraordinary final masterpiece. We start with a woman who is absent, austere, invisible and we journey to an encounter with a fierce mind and deep desire.
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This re-imagining moves into the futuristic territory of cloning, potentially magnifying the experience of the ‘disposable woman.’ In fiction and film the clone is familiar territory but when was the female clone/robot not beautiful? When was she not an object? If we release her from that what does she become? Does her journey into sex and love becomes more powerful as she can be fully realised as human as we see the journey through her own eyes.
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But mostly this re-imaging explores an austere, wild mind and a journey that might be about becoming aware of the possibility of love. Or inversely understanding that the life of the mind is a place you live alone.
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Designed by the brilliant Jess Curtis
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'Part of West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Brontë season, this bold reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s final novel may not appeal to the purists – there isn’t a bonnet in sight – but as a piece of powerful new writing it certainly gets my vote.'
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Yorkshire Post
Published by Oberon Books
Villette Adapted by Linda Marshall Griffiths
Villette Adapted by Linda Marshall Griffiths