Wuthering Heights in Cornwall

The Ilkley Playhouse production of Wuthering Heights arrives to Cornwall:

Ilkley Playhouse present
Wuthering Heights
adapted by Yvette Huddleston and Walter Swan from Emily Brontë’s novel.
the Minack Theatre
July 29,30,31 August 1,2 at 8 pm  and July 31 & August 2 at 2 pm

Heathcliff and Cathy – the names have entered the popular imagination as icons of passionate and romantic love despite the fact that Catherine Earnshaw is, at times, spiteful, capricious and wilful, a young woman that her servant/companion Nelly Dean wouldn’t wish on any man as his wife. Heathcliff, at different moments in Emily Brontë’s novel, is described as devilish, a murderer, as inhuman yet he has come to be seen as a dark and brooding gothic hero.

This new adaptation explores the complete story of Wuthering Heights from Heathcliff’s arrival on the moors, adopted by the Earnshaws as a child, to his eventual self-willed death in middle age. The depth and ferocity of the love that Heathcliff and Cathy feel for each other is undoubted and hugely significant, so why exactly does Cathy choose to marry local landowner Edgar Linton instead?

Many film or stage versions of the story end with Cathy’s strange and unnecessary demise, neglecting the whole of the second half of the novel which features the next generation – Heathcliff’s son, Cathy’s daughter (also called Cathy) and young Hareton Earnshaw. Here we discover Heathcliff at his most bullying, violent and manipulative, but we also discover another love story that is redemptive, positive and joyful.

Ilkley Playhouse is proud to present a Yorkshire story which still grips its audience today just as powerfully as when it was first conceived at Haworth Parsonage in the 1840s. Its cast of distinctive characters will long endure in the memory.