Last chance to see Linda Marshall Griffiths' future-world reinvention of Charlotte Bronte's Villette

The season presents contemporary responses to the Brontë sisters across performance, dance and music, and as its centrepiece, Griffiths has adapted Charlotte’s experimental late novel. While remaining true to the book's profound insights into longing and loneliness, she imagines the kind of woman its heroine, Lucy Snowe, might have been if Charlotte were writing about a future now.

Lucy Snowe re-emerges as a brilliant, introverted virologist working towards a cure for a pandemic virus, but she is plagued by a past that torments her at every turn. As the urgency and burden of her work intensify, she grapples with the promise and possibility of love and the fear of losing it.

"This re-imagining of Villette gets to the heart of the original novel but finds a way to connect it with a modern audience," says director Mark Rosenblatt, the Playhouse associate director.

"Linda has taken a big bold step with the novel, using a distinct new setting as a way to release the novel's passion and turbulence for a contemporary audience. Relocating and updating the action to a near-future world, Linda has found an extraordinary new way to imagine Charlotte’s Lucy Snowe as an isolated and distanced woman fighting for a place in society. Linda makes Lucy the last survivor of her kind, as indeed the grieving Charlotte Brontë was when she wrote Villette."

Linda, who moved to York from Hebden Bridge seven months ago, recalls a conversation with Mark. "We were talking about things and he said, 'What do you think of Villette?', and I said, 'I love it'. I read it again and loved it even more," she says.

"Often people love Jane Eyre more, but I think in many ways Villette is better. It's a book with an unreliable narrator; a structure that George Eliot followed. Jane Eyre is another one too. It's a similar story: a woman writing after losing all her family; Branwell, Emily and Anne had all died, so Charllotte had survived this terrible thing, and that's all in the book, as are ghosts."

Linda introduces cloning into her interpretation of Villette. "I don't think I have abandoned the book," she says. "It feels very close to the book. It has the extraordinary voice of Lucy Snowe and that's something that I've written boldly in my play.

"It's an imagined world that I'm writing about so it's all up for grabs. You want it to be fun, with magical technology in there, so you have to make it a bold play, in the way that Charlotte was bold."

Villette can be seen in the Courtyard Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, at 7.45pm on Friday and 2.30pm and 7.45pm on Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk