Wuthering Heights review – Emma Rice’s magical adaptation bursts with heart and urgency
Novels are such interior things: we tumble into them inside our minds. But theatre is external, a conduit for makeshift community and collective experience, and to achieve that same transportation requires a more amplified magic.
Luckily UK director Emma Rice, who also wrote this adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, is a magician. She takes the book’s ghost story and re-makes it in the style of one of our oldest theatrical traditions: a Greek tragedy. In her hands, Wuthering Heights reaches beyond the page to become mythology – and offer us a warning.
When Lockwood (Sam Archer) moves into his new rented home on the Yorkshire moors, he immediately tries, with all the graces of polite society, to befriend his brooding landlord Heathcliff (John Leader). After a beyond-prickly visit, complete with a ghost visitation, he has to know: What the hell happened at Wuthering Heights? Why is that house so full of pain?
Related: ‘An impossible passion’: cinema’s long love affair with Wuthering Heights
In the novel, he asks his housekeeper to tell him the story. In this production, he asks the moors themselves, and they answer in a chorus of songs (by Ian Ross) that blend the susurration of breezes with the howling of heavy winds, demonstrated here by lilting folk melodies that skim and ride over foot-stomping rhythms; there is a live band that gives the show a thrumming, insistent heartbeat. The Leader of the Moors (Nandi Bhebhe) is an ever-watchful presence, a collective conscience: she demands Lockwood pay attention to the story of Heathcliff and Catherine and their children. The moors have been watching. The moors don’t want this cruelty repeated.
And there is much cruelty in Brontë’s story: that behind-closed-doors violence from partners and siblings and parents that shape us, and shape those who come after us. Those legacies are made painfully clear here; the moors remind us that actions plant seeds to be sowed later.
Heathcliff is taken in to Wuthering Heights as a child alongside Catherine (Stephanie Hockley) and her brother Hindley (Matthew Churcher), only to be tortured by his new brother for his skin colour and lower social station, and we watch that brutality harden Heathcliff’s heart. Catherine, gorgeously wild as a child, succumbs to society’s demands that she marry wealthy and appropriately-matched Edgar (also Archer), though her soul cries out for Heathcliff. When Catherine dies, the moors scoop her up into their song and bear her aloft.
Then, the cycles begin anew with Catherine’s daughter and Hindley and Heathcliff’s sons. It’s a lot to bear! At the top of the second act Heathcliff looks out at us and asks if we’re ready for more – egging us on as we cheer for it, a god of revenge revelling in an audience. Teasingly, he asks us if we want some softness, and the chorus sings that if we want romance, we should head to a Broadway show instead.
But for all its harshness as a story, this play is suffused with love. Rice’s production is frequently funny and tender, letting Lockwood and Little Linton (Rebecca Collingwood) play up their sensitive social graces to the point of absurdity. The chorus adds little touches of delight to remind us that life offers more than pain, fluttering birds across the stage by holding books on sticks, indulging in a little puppetry to show us the smallness of children, and turning the wuthering winds into jump ropes for the characters to play with and revel in. This levity is added in liberally and generously; we fall in love when we share joy together, and as an audience we must fall in love with this story too.
Hockley’s Catherine is bursting with love she cannot express and we feel it in our guts; this production places high value on movement (from choreographer Etta Murfitt) and when she and Heathcliff approach each other, you see and feel her become more alive the closer they get. And when the next generation of lovers find some hard-won happiness against all odds, the moors offer it to us with a literal blue sky. The moors are rewarding the behaviours they want to see from the people who live on their land: forgiveness, closeness, connection, care. And we should know better than to ignore the cries of country.
Slowly, amid the pain, drenched in a persistent search for love, it becomes clear that Rice is offering us an urgent missive wrapped up in Brontë’s social gothic. Heed her voice of the moors: if we reach for each other across differences and divides, if we choose love over old hatreds and fears, we all become less haunted.
Wuthering Heights runs at Sydney Theatre Company until 15 February
