Our shouty modern age has lost the subtlety of great art
When a theatre critic friend invited me to Wuthering Heights at the National last week, I thought of how I had loved Emily Brontë’s book when I read it in my 20s, how terribly sad and moving and complex it all was, and I said yes.
Silly me for forgetting that it was the National in 2022, where plays are filleted and re-assembled to show how down with the kids, how “accessible” and modern and woke it is. And silly me for not having done my research on this production’s creator: Emma Rice, known for a brashifying and filmifying approach to the stage. Here she lost no time in showing that, as the book’s new interpreter, Brontë’s masterpiece would get the same treatment.
The production opens with the tenant Lockwood at the door of Wuthering Heights, desperate to escape the storm outside. But it’s a caricature: Lockwood is a prancing toff, the storm is represented by cringe-making yelling from studenty types on the side, and everything is terribly, well, theatrical.
My heart sank and sank as one by one the characters were reduced to the two-dimensional cut-outs of the Netflix age, depleted of all the articulacy and complexity of Brontë’s 1847 effort. While I confess to being unable to suppress a few tears, they were superficial – nothing like the deep grief and yearning with which the novel haunts its readers.
By far the hardest to watch was Cathy, Heathcliff ’s beloved, played by Lucy McCormick. Dressed in an ill-fitting green pullover and tattered sundress for most of it, she had the arrogant, uncontrolled volatility of the boarding-school hippy wildchild and it seemed, at times, that Rice also wanted her to be autistic, her hands over her ears as she wheeled and shuddered and told people to get off her. Cathy here was no romantic heroine, but a deeply troubled, mentally ill girl hurtling to her death. Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) was a somewhat non-event.
Passion, then, now seems to mean a lot of shouting and hitting people and generally behaving abominably. It made me mourn for the world we have lost, a world of richness, subtlety and heartbreak far more searing than anything the contemporary, Netflix-saturated world seems to know or want.