Storms to satisfy
Wuthering Heights
★★★★✩
Adapting a classic novel can be a poisoned chalice in theatre. So much of an audience arrives braced for disappointment. Yet director Emma Rice’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic manages to be both irreverent and respectful, serious yet playful. It also effortlessly expands from the smallish Bristol Old Vic where it was first seen into one of the most difficult to fill stages, the National’s Lyttelton where plays can be drowned by the enormous space they have to fill.
But it helps here that the setting is the Yorkshire Moors, where Heathcliff and Catherine’s love is more destructive than the storms that lash the landscape. Instead the impossibly high ceilings of a room demanded by this stage, we have the glowering skies of the moor. When the action moves to within the walls of Wuthering Heights, realism is rejected in favour of a set constructed from reclaimed wood and window frames that could have been nicked from a skip.
Good ideas glue together this flotsam and jetsam show. Among the best of these is that the moor itself is given the role of an all singing and dancing Greek-like chorus (led by Nandi Bhebhe). It witnesses, with detached judgement, the cruelty of humans who live on its surface. The idea could so easily have fallen flat. But it works not least because the folk-infused music to which the moor dances and chants (composer Ian Ross) drives the show’s momentum.
Ash Hunter and Lucy McCormick as one of literature’s most mutually toxic relationships are respectively brooding and unhinged. So much so in McMormick’s case that she gets licence to grab a mic and deliver a full throated angst, as if she is already possessed by the ghost she is destined to become. Or it might be the spirit of Kurt Cobain, such is are the suicidal depths the show reaches when it lunges abruptly into the realms of a grunge rock gig.
Rice’s production is finely balanced between playfulness and respect, not only for the source material, but for the dark themes that run through it. As Brontë’s characters die like flies from 18th Century illness, the role of Craig Johnson’s exasperated doctor is more of funeral director than medic. Hunter is an excellent Heathcliff. His solid rage is never better illustrated than when the excellent Sam Archer as the lodger arrives at Wuthering Heights in the middle of a storm. And while Archer brilliantly conjures the power of the wind with a controlled physicality that sees him lean at impossible angles into the imagined gale, out steps Hunter’s Heathcliff as still as an oak’s trunk, impervious to elements, anchored by the mistreatment meted out to him since the death of the man who adopted him as a boy.
The book is constantly acknowledged. It is there in the hands of the chorus as they struggle to keep track of Brontë’s timevaulting plot, and on the end of sticks, pages flapping like birds in the sky. This as much an homage to — as an adaptation of — a classic. Devotees can safely sip from this benign chalice.