Rice’s adaptation is characteristically meta in its display of artifice: the facade of Wuthering Heights is just that, a flat moved around by backstage staff (set design by Vicki Mortimer). The Yorkshire moors are human – fittingly for a story in which they are such an animate feature – and appear as a Greek chorus led by Nandi Bhebhe, fresh from Rice’s Bagdad Cafe, who wears shrubbery in her hair and is marvellously arch.In childhood, Heathcliff, Cathy and Hindley are puppets. Lucy McCormick then plays Cathy as a knotty-haired rebel in Doc Martens who twitches, growls and laughs manically. She breaks into “rock chick” mode at one point with a mic and wind machine, part singing, part yodelling, while the live band (Sid Goldsmith, Nadine Lee and Renell Shaw) creates heavy metal sounds.Lockwood (Sam Archer) is a posh southerner in wellies, while Isabella (Katy Owen) and Edgar Linton (Archer, doubling up), from the well-to-do Thrushcross Grange, are dressed in foppish outfits and twizzle around their living room as if their life is one long ball, with Isabella speaking fabulous lines like: “Sometimes I like to slide down the banister because it tickles my tuppence.”Owen also plays young Linton (Heathcliff’s son by Isabella), who is the incarnation of Walter the Softy from the Beano. She is a standout comic force in both roles along with Tama Phethean, who plays Hindley and Hareton with a mix of physical comedy, pathos and kookiness.It all seems ingenious and faintly ridiculous, like a postmodern literary satire or an especially outré episode of Inside No 9 and risks having nowhere to go beyond tripping one-liners and theatrical navel-gazing. But it builds its world, albeit a conspicuously artificial one, and holds us in it with an intensity of its own, and there is beauty, with the vast backdrop of sky changing from black cloud to haze and then to soft, bouncing blue.Some innovations feel sacrilegious; the all-consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff – the beating heart of Brontë’s novel – is neutered here and when Cathy says “Heathcliff is more myself than I am”, it does not seem powered by passion but theatricality.Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) does not smoulder, but he does skulk and seems like the only character being played straight. He is emphatically an outsider, speaking with a Caribbean accent and told to “Go back where you came from” by Hindley, his words carrying all their modern-day connotations. He grows more vicious too, and with this the drama manages to capture some of the dark energy of the book in its presentation of cruelty, grudge-bearing and beatings. Heathcliff’s physical and emotional abuses appear shocking and destructive, even in this landscape of whimsy.Ultimately, the show succeeds because it is not just very funny, but both charming and intelligent in its humour. If this is unfaithful storytelling, it is exquisitely pulled off. (Arifa Akbar)
Wuthering Heights is a difficult novel to adapt, though it has frequently been attempted. But Emma Rice’s punchy and very clever new stage version tackles Emily Brontë’s tempestuous, rambling story brilliantly.It even manages to thread in a few good jokes about how confusing the original can be, with all those overlapping, hard-to-remember names and sudden jumps in time.It is, however, the performances that really sell it. Lucy McCormick makes Cathy a wild child in the most straightforward way. Sulky and bedraggled long before she starts haunting the moors as a tormented zombie/ghost, she flies around in a semi-feral state.She shows, most of all, Cathy’s self-destructive streak – constantly saying what she obviously doesn’t mean, and lashing out at Heathcliff each time she feels sad, bad or lonely. But she does so the way a nine-year-old would push the boy they liked into a lump of dog poo and then wonder why he didn’t like them any more.There’s also genuine tenderness and chemistry between her and Ash Hunter’s Heathcliff, who often seems to be demonstrating extreme self-restraint towards the people around him, rather than the rashness and violence the character is known for. It adds up to a convincingly desperate and volatile love affair, one that was probably always destined to end badly.Katy Owen is also superb – and extremely funny – as, firstly, the uber-prissy Isabella Linton and, later, the evil invalid Linton Heathcliff, a villainous Little Lord Fauntleroy figure wrapped up in satin bows and spewing out contempt.But the real star of the piece, and the essence of Rice’s perceptive take on Wuthering Heights, is Nandi Bhebhe as The Moor, which here means the Yorkshire Moors.Embodying the rugged landscape, she is a sort of ever-present mystical figure. Sometimes she assumes a maternal role as characters pour out their sorrows to her. At other times, she’s like a narrator, guide or witness.It’s a seamless addition to the story which captures the force and wildness of the Brontë landscape, while also helping to steer us through this tragic story and how we’ve come to understand, or remember, the characters within it. (Rosemary Waugh)
In their roles as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, Lucy McCormick and Ash Hunter are fantastic and acting throughout the show in general is of a very high standard. The impressive singing was another highlight for me as music is used well throughout to add to the narrative.As usual for shows at the Bristol Old Vic, the scenography was perfect. The stage was beautifully decorated and a great attention to detail could be seen throughout, from the costumes to the props. (Estel Farell Roig)
Surfing on the wave of energy that pulsates through the auditorium, Catherine McCormick’s wide-eyed, wild-haired Catherine is an electrifying presence, arriving in her Vivienne Westwood heels and wailing into a microphone, vital, mesmeric and untouchable as a rock goddess.“I am Heathcliff!,” she proclaims. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Perhaps she is emblematic of the trauma that inner turmoil can wreak; the self destruction that will unravel us when we cannot live with ourselves.And so it proves – when she is forced apart from the kindred spirit she had found in Heathcliff, Catherine is consigned to haunting him from beyond the grave, a constant absent presence, stalking behind him throughout the second half. Heathcliff too, is caught in a paradox; like Roman Emperor Nero, he “cares too much, and yet cares not at all”.Ash Hunter as Heathcliff is a magnetic force, commanding, volatile and unforgiving. For some, the romantic hero at the mercy of his own fate, and for others, an antagonist driven only by revenge; Rice deliberately blurs those lines and shows us the collective responsibility of revenge, as The Moor chorus repeatedly warns “be careful what you seed”.The innovation and artistry woven into the production is Wise Children at its emotionally-charged best, and effectively mirrors the pathetic fallacy woven through Brontë’s novel. The seamless blend of puppetry, design, music and film, and Etta Murfitt’s choreography, is testament to the long-time collaborators working in pursuit of Rice’s artist vision. (Sarski Anderson)
Kennen Sie die Schriftsteller Currer, Acton und Ellis Bell? Vermutlich nicht. Dabei schufen sie Werke, die zu den größten der Weltliteratur gehören. Heute sind sie allerdings unter ihren wahren Namen bekannt: Charlotte, Emily und Anne Brontë. Zeitlebens veröffentlichten die Autorinnen ihre Werke wie „Sturmhöhe“ oder „Jane Eyre“ unter männlichen Pseudonymen. Denn Frauen, so erzählt es Elke Heidenreich in ihrem neuen Buch, kommen in der Literatur noch bis zur Romantik nur als unglückliche Geliebte vor, nicht als eigene Schöpferinnen von Literatur. Zwar habe es einige Schriftstellerinnen gegeben – diese mussten aber „unter demütigenden Umständen veröffentlichen“, etwa mit fiktiven männlichen Namen. (Translation)
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