Susannah York's laryngitis and more reviews of Birmingham's Wuthering Heights

Unfortunately, April de Angelis's adaptation of Wuthering Heights in Birmingham was cancelled yesterday's evening due to Susannah York's being struck down by acute laryngitis, as reported by the Birmingham Mail. An understudy will take her place for a few nights, as confirmed by the theatre's website.

Please note that the part of Nelly Dean will be played by Victoria Yeates this evening. Ms Yeates is standing in for Susannah York who has been struck down by acute laryngitis. We wish Ms York a speedy recovery.

However, the reviews of this play continue trickling in. From The Times, which gives this production two stars out of five:

How do you condense 400 pages of Emily Brontë’s passionate prose into a play that doesn’t end up bouncing between brooding and histrionics?
April De Angelis’s new adaptation does a good job of cramming in all the key scenes and fragments of dialogue from the 1847 original. But you want more than a good precis from a trip to the theatre, and Indhu Rubasingham’s professional but impersonal production doesn’t have anything to add to its source material.
That lack of an angle encourages some rather roughhewn performances. Well, nobody acts badly, exactly – but then nor does anyone really connect with anyone else.
That’s fine for Simon Coates’s Lockwood, the self-admiring London booby through whose eyes we see the story, or for Toby Dantzic as a Tony Blair-voiced Linton, the prig who tries to shut out Heathcliff from Cathy’s life once they are married. But it’s bad news indeed for Amanda Ryan, who is impressive as the young Catherine (Linton’s daughter) but whose headstrong Cathy lacks the same easy touch.
She shuns marriage with the lowly love of her life, Heathcliff, even though “he’s more myself than I am”. Yet whatever conflagration of actorly atoms is required to make you buy into such a passion, it’s not visible between her and Antony Byrne’s rude and nasty Heathcliff.
Without that, they both end up looking like drama queens, she histrionic, he brooding like some, well, like some would-be Heathcliff.
As Nelly, Susannah York does well with her character’s mix of defiance and economic dependence. But, hovering around scenes as she recalls events to Lockwood, she reacts just a fraction of a second too keenly to events – as if she’s taking her bearings from the script in her head, rather than from what’s happening on stage.
So the story is told, and a murky mood is created, but it’s hard to believe that these characters have a life offstage. There’s one moment, early on, where it looks as if the actors are going to have some fun.
Lockwood is chuntering away, there’s an incongruous, isolated fall of snow, then he adds: “And it’s snowing.”
Hooray, you think: it’s funny. But more than that, it’s “theatre”. For, however much an adaptation condenses, it also needs to add something to replace all those lovely lost words.
That glimmer of playfulness gone, Rubasingham’s production does nothing vastly wrong and nothing vastly right. But for a tale billed as “passionate and spellbinding”, it’s serving short measures. (Dominic Maxwell)

From the Sunday Mercury:

Kate Bush has a lot to answer for.
Emily Bronte’s classic novel is about the passionate love affair between Cathy and Heathcliff set on the desolate Yorkshire moors.
The squeaky-voiced pop singer had a No. 1 hit in 1978 with her preposterous song of the same name which makes me guffaw every time I hear it.
April De Angelis is also treading on boggy ground with this over-long mish-mash of a stage adaptation.
Here, there is a ferocious (but invisible) dog; two babies consisting of sloppily-folded blankets; adults playing gawky children (badly); dodgy and often incomprehensible Northern accents; and lots of shouting masquerading as emotion.
To add to the woes, Heathcliff – always seen as tall, dark and handsome – is played by an actor who is short, stocky and bald.
To my shame, I thought the novel finished with Cathy’s death. But, true to the book, the second half of the show chronicles the next-generation relationship between Cathy’s daughter and Heathcliff’s son.
This is not only mind-numbingly boring but makes the play nearly three hours long. And it needs a narrator to explain all the twists and turns. Yuk!
Amanda Ryan as Cathy and Antony Byrne as Heathcliff are OK, while Susannah York is the on-stage story teller.
Wuthering Heights runs until Saturday, October 18. (Bob Haywood)

Categories: In the News, Theatre, Wuthering Heights