The Heights in Dublin

A new theater production inspired by Wuthering Heights opens today, January 31, in Dublin, Ireland:

Playgroup
THE HEIGHTS
A show by Playgroup
inspired by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

8.15 PM 31 JANUARY - 16 FEBRUARY 2008

I'm coming back, love,
Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream,
My only master.
Too long I roamed in the night.
I'm coming back to his side, to put it right.
Kate Bush, Wuthering Heights

The love story of the century told by the children left behind. Wuthering Heights filtered through a kaleidoscope of 1980s excess and remixed in the decade of decadence. A visceral and visual piece of extreme storytelling featuring live video, big hair, rock ballads, and dancing.
A story everybody thinks they know reimagined for our time.
' a courageous project... takes performance out of the predictable and into uncharted territory ' -Evening Echo on the Irish Theatre Award Nominated Dark Week

Performance Dates, Tickets and Information

MON-THURS ~ Tickets €15 & €12 (conc*)
FRI-SAT ~ Tickets €17 & €14 (conc*)

Preview(s) 29 JANUARY - 30 JANUARY ~ Tickets €10
Matinee(s) SAT 9 & 16 FEBRUARY ~ Tickets €10

More details can be found in The Independent:

"It's an attempt to transpose the plot, characters and key ideas from Wuthering Heights into a contemporary urban context," explains the show's director and designer Tom Creed. "We wanted to look at the idea of place as an emotional state. In the book, it's all about the people being from the moors and infused with that wild moorish passion. We wanted to see what would happen if you infused that story with the energies of the city.
"We also wanted to examine the fact that the book is essentially divided into two parts, the first being the ill-fated love story between Cathy and Heathcliff and then the part where their descendants get together and repair all the damage that's been done.
"Our two settings are the present and in the 1980s. And our Cathy and Heathcliff are playing out their wild passions against a backdrop of '80s pop and that huge wave of new money."
Creed claims this is not a musical, but then admits the cast will be singing text and songs will be a key feature of the mise-en-scene.
"The music will be adding elements to the plot, but you won't have Cathy suddenly bursting into song," he insists.
But although the characters themselves will not be singing the songs, there will be a lot of '80s music and some numbers will be performed live. There may also be singalong moments, as few of us can refrain from joining in when A-Ha is playing.
The press release explains further, describing the show as being "filtered through a kaleidoscope of 1980s excess and remixed in the decade of decadence. A visceral and visual piece of extreme storytelling featuring live video, big hair, rock ballads and dancing."
But there is one word that's most noticeable for its absence and that's a word that can strike fear into the heart of many a theatergoer -- 'devised'. (...)
And Creed does admit he consciously avoided using the dreaded d-word, but does have a reasonably good explanation. "The plot is from Wuthering Heights and much of the text is from the book, but we do consider this a collective rather than devised work."
Creed himself manned the reins during rehearsals and script editing and was aided by the company's dramaturg, Lynda Radley.
"But keeping us on the straight and narrow is a really good story written by Bronte herself. And the reason we haven't credited anyone with writing this particular production is that the main author is Bronte herself. About 60 per cent of the text is hers and a sizeable amount of the rest is song lyrics.
"We've also drawn on various screen adaptations to a degree without taking anything verbatim from them. Essentially, it has all come together through improvising situations from Wuthering Heights in a contemporary context."
It's Bronte, Jim, but not as we know her. (Sophie Gorman)

In The Irish Times we can read:

WHAT on earth is "extreme storytelling"? This is the phrase used to describe The Heights , a new stage adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (a story which was extreme enough to begin with).
In the hands of the restlessly imaginative theatre company Playgroup, though, the 19th-century story of destructive passion and bitter revenge on the bleak Yorkshire moors has been updated, relocated and reshaped to include almost every reference to Brontë's novel in contemporary culture - from 1930s movie adaptations to 1980s power ballads.
"Extreme storytelling is something we made up," admits Tom Creed, director of the show and (with Hilary O'Shaughnessy) joint artistic director of the Cork-based company. "Part of the project with The Heights is to look at storytelling and to look at the theatre and see how it works now: how you tell a story using whatever you have to hand. We've created a world where it can make sense as part of the act of storytelling to include singing 1980s cover versions and doing aerobics or acting out melodrama and all sorts of other things we've thrown at it."
That may sound wilfully idiosyncratic, but such an approach may ultimately prove archly faithful to a novel described by Charlotte Brontë as "hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials". It's a good description, too, for the work of Playgroup - if YouTube footage of Kate Bush dancing in the wily, windy moors still counts as homely material. (...)
Given the radical reworking, it may seem odd to hear her say that they went by the book. "It's actually quite faithful," Creed says of their 90-minute version. "The decisions that we've made structurally have all come from a very close reading of the novel."
Their interpretation, however, is certainly extreme, transposing events from the moors to a contemporary city, where the story of Cathy and Heathcliff has now become world famous, and is told and retold through rumours, tabloid spreads, television interviews and Wikipedia entries. In Playgroup's version the second generation characters, generally ignored by film adaptations, have taken on the mantle of the tale, piecing together the lives and times of their parents in the lurid excesses of 1980s art scene.
"Some people have found that to be the most difficult jump," Lynda Radley says of the story's relocation. "For me the most important thing in the Cathy and Heathcliff story is the effect that the environment has on them, and the isolation that they manage to create within it, whether that environment is in the country or the city. The idea of lonely souls wandering through the city, of people being totally alone despite being in a crowd, of two young people who can see nobody but each other still translates quite well."
"And also, do you make a nod to the fact that everyone knows the story?" wonders Creed. "Or that at least everyone has an idea of the story."
"It is sometimes overwhelming when you're trying to acknowledge all [the many previous versions] and yet create something new, that is our own," says Radley. So it is that Playgroup's The Heights stages classic material as though it's a contemporary work, conceiving of Cathy as a model and artistic muse, whose relationships with gallery owner Edgar Linton and her adopted brother Heathcliff are the stuff of intense media speculation, while one of the novel's original narrators, the housekeeper Nelly Dean, is now a music journalist and author of a controversial exposé.
"We're having a go at all the iconic scenes," says Creed. "And some of them are being reshaped as [ Cathy and Heathcliff] booking into a hotel for two weeks, or talkshow interviews, conversations with your hairdresser, or songs: some scenes we're rendering as 1980s cover versions." (Peter Crawley)

If you are interested check this previous post of ours.

Categories: Theatre, Wuthering Heights