TAKING BRONTE TO WILD NEW HEIGHTS
Wuthering Heights (Bristol Old Vic) Verdict: Moor excitement than you can stand
A GIGGLY, ungodly ragamuffin wanders on to the stage, opens a clothbound book and cracks a whip — expertly — breaking loose a hellish storm.
Once again, director Emma Rice has thrown away all the rulebooks and harnessed the beating heart and slippery soul of Emily Bronte’s unwieldy gothic monster, Wuthering Heights, in a wildly imaginative, exhilarating piece of theatre.
Gone is the housekeeper narrator, Nelly. Instead an all-singing, all-dancing chorus sounds every note of the novel, raising it into the realms of Greek tragedy and making a magnificent character of the Yorkshire Moors — which stretch from the haunted, forbidding crags of Wuthering Heights to the sunlit pastures of Thrushcross Grange.
Led by Nandi Bhebhe, majestic in a crown of twigs, the Moors howl up a hurricane, warning: ‘Be careful what you seed.’ Lucy McCormick’s compelling Catherine dominates the first half, torn between two lovers: the soulmate of Ash Hunter’s brooding, untameable Heathcliff but drawn to the softness of pampered, pampering Edgar Linton (Sam Archer).
Words pour out of her until finally, as a Tina
Turner-like rock goddess, she sings: ‘I am earth, I am sky.’
The story emerges with remarkable clarity. Characters are introduced, their names chalked on slates which become gravestones on their deaths.
Rice finds comedy where there was none: a character arrives in a deerstalker, blown in by the storm, leaning at an acute angle to suggest the hurtling wind.
A skull with ears fixed on the blade of a scythe becomes a hilariously savage puppet hound. As Heathcliff’s wife, Isabella, Katy Owen flits with elastic daintiness; as her son, she is reborn as the lisping sibling of Just William’s Violet Elizabeth Bott.
Inevitably perhaps, with Catherine gone, the intensity slips in the second half, but with young Cathy finding happiness, Rice embraces sunshine and hope.
Just as the books fastened at the ends of bendy sticks conjure the quivering birds on the Moor, so Rice has given glorious dramatic wings to Wuthering Heights.