Unleashing the fire and the fury of Emily Brontë’s genius
Wuthering Heights Bristol Old Vic ★★★★✩
‘If you want romance, go to Cornwall,” says the chorus at the start of the second half of Emma Rice’s wild and exhilarating adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic masterpiece. Cornwall, of course, is Rice’s former spiritual home where she ran the now sadly demised Kneehigh, turned it into the South West’s pre-eminent theatre company, and, over a series of acclaimed productions, indulged her own love for a romantic weepie, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Recent productions with her newish theatre company, Wise Children, have prioritised dreamily romantic effect over actual drama, but there’s precious little whimsy about her racially charged Wuthering Heights.
Instead, she unleashes the novel’s awful cruelty and fury in a fullthrottle show while retaining Brontë’s cool-eyed clarity on a cast of monsters whose inherited cycles of toxic dysfunction leave Succession’s Roy family looking like The Waltons.
Rice starts her show with a gag about the weather: as Sam Archer’s cut-glass accented Lockwood attempts to step outside Heathcliff ’s windswept moorland home, he’s met by actors screaming Hammer-horror style in his face. Yet those hostile, ungovernable moors are also a character in their own right, replacing narrator Nelly Dean in the form of a Greek tragedy-style chorus. Against a backdrop of scudding clouds, the only props are a wooden door and that famous window. Poor Cathy might not ever be able to get back in, but this is much more a story about people unable to break free.
It also feels very modern. Rice foregrounds Heathcliff ’s implied racial heritage in the novel by casting BAME actor Ash Hunter in the role, while Lucy Mccormick’s pleasingly yobbish, untameable Cathy has been brutalised by the suffocating restraints of growing up a woman in 19th-century Yorkshire. Like a more unhinged Hedda Gabler, she’s hemmed in wherever she goes, yet, like Ibsen’s anti-heroine, it’s also clearly her own character that ruins her. Meanwhile, Hunter manages to make the diabolical Heathcliff sympathetic without remotely glamourising him.
Rice’s directorial style tends less towards psychological naturalism than to a heightened, self-conscious theatricality. It’s a tricky mode to deploy in a story such as this but she treads a rewarding line between driving home the mind-wringing anguish and pointing up the melodrama. As the body count mounts, Craig Johnson’s amusingly put-upon doctor almost has a breakdown. There is a neat reflexive awareness that Brontë’s death-and-madness-saturated story is simultaneously extraordinary and at times simply too much.
Thank heavens, then, for Rice’s irrepressible lack of piety. Katy Owen plays Edgar’s sister Isabella as a giddy, silly bon bon of a woman in a dress. There’s a nice little joke about how confusing a story can be when all the characters are related to each other and have such similar sounding names.
There are no new theatre tricks that Rice fans won’t have seen before, but it all works beautifully – the seamless integration of live music and song; the way Rice simply can’t resist turning the tiny note of optimism that ends the novel into a full-on celebration featuring flowers, tea and cake. Frankly, by the end of this, you’ll be grateful for it.
Until Nov 6 and then at the National Theatre from Feb 3 2022. Tickets: 0117 987 7877; bristololdvic.org.uk