New tilt at Brontë classic fails to capture novel’s intoxicating oddness
Wuthering Heights
Royal Exchange Manchester
All manner of wild passions haunt Emily Brontë’s uncontainable tale of Cathy and Heathcliff ’s desperate longing against the Yorkshire moors. It’s a novel steeped in visions, nightmares, madness and a lot of terrible weather, and it’s a major challenge to find a theatrical language to match Brontë’s febrile imagination when it comes to putting it on stage.
In what is Bryony Shanahan’s first production as the new co-artistic director of the Royal Exchange, writer Andrew Sheridan opts for a mix of the poetic and the prosaic. Perhaps wisely concentrating only on the first half of the novel, it’s a deft, economical adaptation that aims to strip back some of the clotted romance that has accumulated around Brontë’s genre-defying tragedy. It’s still a world of ungovernable feelings, populated by unstable men who carve their jealousy into their arms and remove cubs from dead vixens and stamp on them, but there is bright comedy here too. When the respectable Edgar Linton comes calling on Cathy, now a young woman, her controlling brother Hindley (a deadly silky Gurjeet Singh) falls over himself in his oleaginous efforts to impress him, while Rhiannon Clements is an amusingly puppyish Isabella, eagerly trying to keep up with Cathy and Heathcliff as they run across the heather.
Still, every new take on Wuthering Heights stands or falls by its Heathcliff. Alex Austin’s version is, alas, no diabolical Byronic hero but a coarse brute with estuary vowels and a fondness for the F-word and whose deranged petulance sometimes puts you more in mind of a stroppy teenager than someone you’d happily follow through the gates of hell. Granted, Heathcliff is a sadistic nightmare of a man but you’ve got to swoon a little bit, surely. Rakhee Sharma’s Cathy is wonderful, though: difficult, imperious and a real child of outdoors whose self-sabotaging betrayal of Heathcliff is heartbreaking. There’s a lovely moment late on when both stand in silence, taunted by a memory of their childhood selves chasing each other ecstatically across the moors.
Ah, those moors. Under some ugly strip lighting, they are represented here by what looks suspiciously like artificial turf. There’s a lot of running round the Exchange’s circular stage to suggest, you know, a longing for freedom, and some weird animalistic spitting and growling from Cathy and Heathcliff to crudely convey their savagery.
Sheridan blends in a fair amount of Brontë’s poems, while an onstage band produce a blend of keening folk laments and some rather more thrilling electric guitar riffs. The delicate final scene hints beautifully at the destructive legacy of Cathy and Heathcliff that is yet to unfold. But Brontë’s novel to some extent exists in the mind of the reader as a sort of hallucination – a fever dream of a world shaped by unfathomable cruelties and desires. Shanahan’s production is at its clumsiest when trying to capture some of that imaginative spirit, with the result that the novel’s intoxicating, allconsuming strangeness remains stubbornly out of reach.
Until March 7. Tickets: 0161 833 9833; royalexchange.co.uk