King’s Theatre, Edinburgh – until Saturday 28th May 2022
Reviewed by Ellen Searle
5*****
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Emma Rice’s outstandingly creative theatrical adaptation of Wuthering Heights is well worth the 108,000 words of Emily Bronte’s classic novel. The characters of Cathy and Heathcliff are burnt into our collective cultural consciousness, a forbidden, brooding love destined for tragedy. While their story is undoubtedly the thundering gothic-romantic heart of the story, this adaptation also provides nuanced characterisation of all the main characters, as well as their life stories and context, bringing the epic nature of the book to the stage in its full glory. With the quality cast you would expect from any production associated with the National Theatre, and the use of sophisticated staging techniques, this show, like the novel itself, transcends time and place as it explores the fundamental nature of our psyche, and in so doing, stimulates the senses, the heart and the mind.
Lucy McCormick plays Catherine Earnshaw with an unsettling energetic frenzy in life, and an equally unsettling forlorn moodiness in death. Liam Tamne’s Heathcliff is suitably brooding and violent, but it is his sensitive depiction of Heathcliff ‘s vulnerability and occasional tenderness that reveals his essential human vulnerability. The gentle being within is brutalised by the cruelty and disdain that is dished upon him, and which he in turn dishes upon others. The theme of cruelty begetting cruelty is beautifully echoed and expanded throughout the work, through the multiple characters of the Earnshaw and Linton households, played brilliantly by Sam Archer, Katy Owen, Stephanie Hockly and Tama Phethean.
Of course, we have the bleak, wild Yorkshire moor, its centrality to the story expressed vividly by it consisting in part of the actors themselves. Nandi Bhebe plays the leader of the Moor with a calm authority as she holds the reins of the story. Along with the comedy elements, her characterisation provides welcome balance to the intense emotions of the human characters.
A host of theatrical devices are used on Vicki Mortimer’s wonderful set. Brechtian alienation techniques such as full view of the wardrobe and props in the wings, keep us conscious that we are watching a play, further engaging our intellect to reflect on the what we see. Leitmotifs such as the swarming crows projected onto a video screen at each death help us navigate the narrative. Ian Ross’s music is played on the stage, giving us everything from hard rock to an Irish folk song, and we have a range of puppets, most imaginatively the birds, their flapping wings being in fact the flapping pages of books at the end of poles held by actors, a reminder of and respectful tribute to the source material. Yet this wild array of techniques and devices do not distract, instead they are skilfully crafted together to underpin the key themes and narrative of the piece.
All in all, this highly imaginative adaptation of Wuthering Heights is true to and worthy of Emily Bronte’s classic novel ~ get a ticket, now!