Wuthering Heights Review
If you love the novel (as I do), you will feel somewhat cheated.
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Our verdict
As I took my seat in The Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames, I asked myself whether the world needed another theatrical adaptation of Wuthering Heights. This latest version from the Inspector Sands theatre company is a brave attempt, but for me, sadly fell short of expectations.
Director Lucinka Eisler, who adapted and conceived the piece with writer Ben Lewis, talks about “treading the line between darkness and comedy”. Here’s where I think the problem lies. This is Wuthering Heights with much larking about and wry postmodern references (Brexit partly inspired it), but somehow lacking in emotional tension and suspense.
It’s more like a theatrical version of one of those ‘Study Notes’ books that allow students to bag top grades in English Lit without ever actually reading the texts. But the more it tries to explain the novel’s complexities with gimmicks like the family tree character board to explain who’s who, the more it condescends to the audience.
While I was interested to see how some popular literary debates were treated, I’m not sure we gained many new insights. For example, there is the question of whether Heathcliff was of African origin.
In a post-Bridgerton world, having a black actor play Heathcliffe no longer feels very daring, especially as we have seen this before in film and TV versions.
We know that Earnshaw Senior finds Heathcliff as an orphan in Liverpool (at the peak of the slave trade), adopts him and treats him as his favourite while neglecting his own children.
But whether Heathcliff is black or, as the novel states, a dark-skinned “gipsy”, the key point is that after Earnshaw’s death, he is mistreated by his step-brother, Hindley and then abandoned by his beloved Cathy, who opts for a safe, respectable marriage with Edgar Linton. Do we have to believe that Hindley is a racist to consider him a villain?
Another interesting literary theme is whether the story's true villain is the ‘unreliable’ narrator, Nelly Dean, who has been a servant to three generations of Earnshaws.
At one point, it seems like everyone points the finger at her as the ‘not-so-innocent’ bystander, but she seems to wriggle away unscathed. Giulia Innocenti, who plays Nelly, is a talented comic actress and a highlight of the production.
Ike Bennett, who plays Heathcliffe, is also one to watch.
I especially enjoyed his performance of the young Heathcliff, even if he lacked sufficient menace to pull off the deranged, vengeance-seeking Heathcliff completely. This is partly the play's fault, as Heathcliff’s inner demons struggle against the dark forces of comedy.
Earnshaw, Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliffe are all played by Leander Deeny. Some of the costume switches between Edgar and Linton are very funny, and his use of ‘asthmatic’ breathing to convey the weakness of these characters was highly effective.
Nicole Sawyerr, who plays Isabella Linton and Cathy Earnshaw, lights up the stage whenever she appears. While the former is a good example of colour-blind casting, I wondered whether having her play Cathy Linton was a nod to the theory that her character could, in fact, be Heathcliff’s child, which of course, adds to the tragedy.
While Lua Bairstow does a good job of conveying the wild child side of Cathy Earnshaw, what I missed most of all about the play was the wildness of the moors as the real backdrop to this gothic masterpiece.
Instead, we have an oppressive stage set dominated by a kitchen table and an ‘upstairs’ space where from my seat in the stalls, it was often hard to see what was happening.
If you love the novel (as I do), you will feel somewhat cheated by a production that fails to surface the story’s emotional depths. But if you’ve never read the book, you’ll probably be none the wiser about why people consider this one of the greatest novels ever written.
