Wuthering Heights is like Coca-Cola

The Independent gives 3 stars out of 5 to the new Bollywood-style stage adaptation of Wuthering Heights:

'Brontë goes to Bollywood" is how the British-Asian theatre company Tamasha has tagged its cross-over version of Wuthering Heights, in which saris, song and sand replace the rather more dour elements of Emily Brontë's Gothic novel. Although not a homage to Hindi cinema in the way that Slumdog Millionaire is, this adaptation by Deepak Verma is persuasive enough to have reduced the three Oldham-Indian ladies beside me to tears.
As Sanjay in EastEnders, Verma used to say "This time next year we'll be millionaires." Verma might well have struck gold with his idea of relocating the tale of doomed passion and poetic grand vision from the bleak, windswept Heights to the scorched desert of late 18th-century Rajasthan. Here, in India, the turbulent weather conveyed in the Yorkshire word "wuthering" is translated into sandstorms that blast not a heath but a simple set comprising beige ramps and evocative backdrops cinematically lit to convey epic landscapes. Against this background, Brontë's tale of fate, destiny and duty – aspects of Wuthering Heights which Hindu society would recognise all too clearly – is peppered with references to spirituality, dance sequences and a catchy soundtrack by Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee.
The musical opens in a market with camels dotted across the horizon and the tale unfolds through the words of a wanderer carrying a sacred urn. It doesn't take long before Shakuntala has fallen for Krishan whom her father Singh has brought home from the slums. You don't need to identify Brontë's characters since the story unfolds in a perfectly accessible way from whatever culture you approach it. For rigid Victorian values and snobbery, read stringent Indian hierarchies; for complicated, contradictory Bollywood heroine, see feisty, single-minded Yorkshire lass. Kristine Landon-Smith's take on Brontë owes as much to the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as to the novel. But was it fanciful also to detect echoes of Bernard Herrmann's opera? The Bollywood melodrama is kept firmly in check, thanks to the sensitive characterisation of Pushpinder Chani as the Heathcliff character of Krishan opposite Youkti Patel, a vivid Shakuntala (Catherine Earnshaw).
In true Bollywood style, the songs have been pre-recorded in India so that the cast has the additional challenge of lip-synching to some of Bollywood's finest professional playback singers.
Verma has spiced up the English with some humour and incorporated a number of Hindi phrases so that the dialogue comes across more authentically in the genre of Bollywood. It certainly adds an exotic touch.
With a cast of just 11, the director, Kristine Landon-Smith, is hard-pushed to create the kind of all-singing, all-dancing line-up found in a Bollywood extravaganza. However she succeeds in drawing big-hearted performances and if busy market and grand party scenes – and the camel race – seem sparsely peopled, they are handsomely costumed and subtly choreographed.
The pace of the production isn't exactly fast but it seldom drags, the action evolving fluidly. It's no time at all before we're on the banks of the Ganges, spectators at Shakuntala's funeral pyre. The urn on the stranger's back, it becomes clear, contains the fettered spirit of his beloved Shakuntala. Cue another sandstorm into which Baba the narrator disappears, to emerge drifting in the breeze in a pretty "picturisation" as young Krishan is reunited with the freed spirit of Shakuntala. "Shukar he Bhagwan ka" (Thanks be to God) says Ayah (Nelly Dean, of course). It's an imaginative perspective on a great classic and one that, with a little reworking, could surely transfer to the big screen with the same success as Tamasha's East is East. (Lynne Walker)

And the Guardian devotes quite a lengthy article to this production:

When the Asian theatre company Tamasha announced that it was producing a Bollywood version of Wuthering Heights, it could have seemed a crossover project too far. The attempt to splice western content and eastern form has been attempted before without wholly successful results - as Andrew Lloyd Webber and AR Rahman's collaboration Bombay Dreams, or Gurinder Chadha's hapless Jane Austen adaptation, Bride and Prejudice, both proved.
Yet when you consider the elements of Emily Brontë's novel - passionate, larger-than-life characters; wild, spectacular locations; a confusing plot spun out across a couple of generations - it does have all the ingredients of a classic Hindi film. Tamasha's artistic director, Kristine Landon-Smith, was initially sceptical: "When the writer, Deepak Verma, first came to us with the concept of a Bollywood version of Wuthering Heights, my response was, 'Are you kidding?' Then I thought, 'Why not?' On reflection, it seemed one of those ideas so obvious that no one had thought of it."
When Emily Brontë wrote the book she probably didn't have saris and elaborate song-and-dance sequences in mind. But instead of the novel, Tamasha's version takes its inspiration from the melodramatic 1939 movie, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. "It occurred to me that if you added a soundtrack of Hindi pop music to that film you would have the perfect Bollywood prototype," says Landon-Smith.
It's a suggestion that becomes all the more intriguing when you consider that Merle Oberon had Asian parentage: she was born in Mumbai, and her mother was Anglo-Sri Lankan, although this was kept secret at the time. Nor does it require a huge leap of the imagination to perceive Cathy as the archetypal Bollywood heroine: contradictory, complicated and compelled to deal with her emotions by running out of doors - though, in this instance, it will not be the windswept Yorkshire moors but the parched desert of Rajasthan.
"We had to find a way of making the story work in an Indian context," says Landon-Smith, "yet the parallels seem perfectly clear. Rajasthan was a rigidly hierarchical society, controlled by the British. So Heathcliff's mysterious transformation from street urchin to self-made man might be seen to reflect the opportunistic fortunes to be made within the East India Company."
In Verma's adaptation all the characters' names have been changed; the production has also introduced sandstorms, Hindu spirituality and camels. Verma explains: "As a writer, I am interested in creating characters who seem real. Yet Bollywood demands that you use certain archetypes. There has to be sentimentality, a clear distinction between good and evil, and songs and dances."
Tamasha has a long track record of developing Asian drama with broad crossover appeal. It was the company that first produced Ayub Khan-Din's East Is East, and Verma hopes there is similar scope for turning this version of Wuthering Heights into a film. If so, it won't be the first: Brontë's novel has been given the Bollywood treatment a number of times, the earliest being a 1966 film entitled Dil Diya Dard Liya. And the story has emerged in much stranger guises: as a 1950s Spanish-language version set in Mexico; in an all-women treatment by the Japanese company Takarazuka Revue; and, most bizarrely of all, in Cliff Richard's much-reviled stage musical, Heathcliff.
If Cliff seemed an odd fit for Brontë's antihero, Pushpinder Chani, who plays the Heathcliff-inspired character in Tamasha's show, looks very much the part as he rehearses his dance sequences and multilingual dialogue with co-star Youkti Patel. Chani prepared for the part by studying Olivier's performance alongside a number of brooding, Bollywood baddies, but he says the hardest task has been learning how to mime the songs convincingly.
For authenticity's sake, the music for the production has been recorded in India, and the actors must faithfully recreate the vocal performances of some of Bollywood's leading playback singers. "It would be easier just to sing the songs, to be honest," says Chani. "It's not just the words - you have to get all the details of the breathing and the intonation right, otherwise you're just left opening and closing your mouth like a fish."
Though big Bollywood production numbers are difficult to reproduce live on stage, early performances of the show suggest that it should be worth the effort. Even within the bare space of a rehearsal studio, the music helps establish the mood, and the story runs more fluidly. Stage adaptations of Wuthering Heights often stagger beneath the weight of the narrative: here, the central characters' growing infatuation is summed up with one choreographed frolic through the desert.
As the action builds towards a grand funeral rite on the banks of the Ganges, it becomes clear that this version of Wuthering Heights is really more like a spiritual cousin of Emily Brontë's work than its direct descendant. In fact, the two ultimately have so little in common you wonder why Tamasha chose to retain the title. "The title itself is non-negotiable," explains Verma. "It's like Coca-Cola - it's instantly recognisable around the world. There are thousands of people who have never read Wuthering Heights. But everyone knows what it's about." (Alfred Hickling)

Categories: Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights