"Hopefully it will be made into a Bollywood film"

The media are thrilled with the upcoming production (next spring) of a Bollywood-style adaptation of Wuthering Heights by the Tamasha Theatre Company. Some even suggest a possible Bollywood adaptation:

The Independent:

It has all the ingredients for the perfect Bollywood drama: sweeping landscapes, a tortured hero, a long-suffering heroine and an unrequited love story with tragic consequences – Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is about to get a Bollywood makeover.
The acclaimed writer Deepak Verma has put the finishing touches to a musical version of the novel, transposing the quintessentially Yorkshire love tale to the deserts of Rajasthan and swapping Victorian snobbery for India's strict caste system.
The play will be set to Bollywood-style music but will broadly follow the plot of the 1847 novel, which recounts how the tormented foundling Heathcliff fell in love with Catherine, the daughter of the kindly benefactor who took him off the streets of Liverpool.
The brooding figure of Heathcliff is replaced by Krishan, a low-caste street urchin who is adopted by a kindly merchant and falls in love with his headstrong daughter Shakuntala.
Verma, one of the first British-Asian actors to become a household name in the UK when he played Sanjay in EastEnders, said he always thought that the novel lended itself to a Bollywood makeover.
"Marrying Wuthering Heights to Bollywood just seemed like the obvious thing to do," he said. "Everything about it suits Bollywood – a tragic love story set in a beautiful and harsh environment. It's perfect." Casting for the 12 roles has already begun and the production will tour the UK next spring.
The Tamasha Theatre Company, a charity set up in 1989 to bring British-Asian work to the stage, is producing the play. Tamasha has helped launch the careers of some of the most successful British-Asian performers.(...)
Kristine Landon-Smith, who set up Tamasha with the playwright Sudha Bhuchar, said of Wuthering Heights: "This production will go up to the death of Catherine's character. It's the perfect Bollywood tragedy with epic landscapes and epic characters. The hierarchical structure of Victorian society translates very well into the same era in Rajasthan."
Andrew McCarthy, who runs the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, near Bradford, said Wuthering Heights could easily be adapted to different locations and cultures. "I think it's a wonderful idea," he said.
He hoped a Bollywood version of the novel would help open up new audiences to Brontë's classic work. (Jerome Taylor & Sofia Mitra-Thakur)

The Telegraph:

The tale of the tempestuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine is being relocated to the Rajasthan desert.
Deepak Verma, the writer, and the Tamasha theatre company are collaborating on the project, which will debut at the Oldham Coliseum next March before touring Britain.
"It is not like putting a square peg into a round hole," said Kristine Landon-Smith, Tamasha's artistic director.
"I thought of the harsh landscape in the original book, and if you put some swelling Bollywood music behind it you already almost have a Bollywood film. It just felt to me that it was a perfect match. There are points where the emotions get so high that they have to sing instead of speak. It's natural why it should be a musical."
Although Tamasha has already transposed the works of Emile Zola, the French novelist, to an Asian setting, this is the London-based company's first attempt to marry a musical to classic literature.
Rather than being a "high-octane and colourful" production, Landon-Smith said it will have a "moody, Chekovian feel".
"But we're not going to go too far," she told the Sunday Herald. "The production has to meet some of the expectations for a feel-good Bollywood musical."
The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth described the Bollywood Wuthering Heights as "a fairly radical reinterpretation".(Graham Tibbetts)

The news agency France-Press:

Deepak Verma, a former star of popular British soap opera "Eastenders," has turned the classic Emily Bronte novel into a stage musical with a Bollywood theme and hopes to see it move eventually to the big screen.
"The book was just perfect for adaptation. There are so many things about it that just fitted in with aspects of Indian culture," Verma told AFP. "What interested me is the ghostly, haunting aspect of the book.
"The Victorian values in the novel are also found in Indian society and the desert is a harsh place, just like the moors of Yorkshire."
In the musical, the novel's main male character, the brooding Heathcliff, has been renamed Krishnan, a street urchin who falls in love with the merchant who adopts him. (...)
The London-based Tamasha theatre company has already started casting for the 12 roles and the production will tour eight British cities from March, including a four-week run at the respected Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London.
Verma, who is currently producing films in Britain, the United States and India, said he believed the musical would lend itself to a big-budget Bollywood production.
"I really want to get the play out there and then see what happens," he said. "Hopefully it will be made into a Bollywood film. I think it would be perfect."

Categories: Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights