'A classic story of dysfunctional people making mistakes'

YorkMix interviews Lucy McCormick and Ash Hunter who play Cathy and Heathcliff in Wise Children's Wuthering Heights. The production is on stage at York Theatre Royal until 20th November.

What can you tell us about Cathy and Heathcliff as characters – what sort of Heathcliff and Cathy will we see in this version of Wuthering Heights?

L: I’m a bit more intense than Cathy in my actual life.

A: I think what’s quite clear is that we have some similarities to our characters in real life.

I think I’m a lot like him, especially the version that we are doing here. We were saying the version of Heathcliff here isn’t colourblind casting, he is black, he’s got a Jamaican accent. He’s spurned and treated like an outcast, not only because of his poverty or social standing but because of his colour, and that anger that is brewed up within him is a righteous anger.

It’s something that I have felt – I think he is me if I hadn’t found my peace. I actually think that he is less brutal than the Heathcliff in the books, and there was a desire to show that people are not entirely bad or entirely good.

Why do you think this is a story to be telling now?

A: For me, it’s specific to what’s going on in the world and with me and my relationship with my blackness and masculinity. I’m hoping there are people who are going to see this and identify with Heathcliff and his struggles, if you treat someone like a monster then you create a monster.

Hopefully people see that reflection and even out of that can come love and positivity, and if you do face that and deal with your demons something good can loom from it.

L: It’s like reality TV, these awful people play out their lives and people love to look in on it and their mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

It’s a classic story of dysfunctional people making mistakes and hopefully an audience can analyse it and see where it went wrong. Because people can be rubbish. And that’s never going to change, unfortunately.

This is a classic Yorkshire tale, how are your accents coming along?

A: I’m speaking with a Caribbean accent – I love it because of the lyricalness of it. I can’t imagine doing it another way and also where it places him and my voice. It is there to differentiate him from everyone else, you can’t get away from his otherness.

The choice that when he comes back a gentleman, that he hasn’t changed his accent, he’s a more refined posh deeper Jamaican accent but he’s not trying to change who he is, he’s owning it – it’s beautiful.

L: What was weird for me is that it’s close to my accent but not my accent. I’ve almost found that harder than say an American accent or whatever else I’ve done. It’s just working on that subtle difference. Tweaking my own voice. It’s quite annoying!

What can audiences expect to feel after watching this adaptation of Wuthering Heights?

A: Exhausted! It’s a whole gambit of human emotions! Emma hasn’t left anything out.

L: They are going to laugh, they’re going to cry. And feel celebratory at the end but they will have gone through a journey. (Rachel Rogers)

The New York Times reviews Five Tuesdays in Winter, a collection of short stories by Lily King.

In Lily King’s short story “Creature,” 14-year-old Carol has fled the ruins of her parents’ marriage to spend her summer babysitting for the children of a wealthy family in her New England town. She’s just read “Jane Eyre,” and, like Brontë’s heroine, she’s ensconced in a big house with turrets and falls for its broodingly handsome male occupant.

“You cannot know these blistering feelings,” Carol writes in a tumescent letter to a friend, “— you have not met your Rochester. But believe me, they are so powerful that now every novel, every line of poetry, makes perfect and vivid sense.” (Megan O’Grady)

On Showbiz Junkies, actress Ruth Negga, who stars in an adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing.

“Thinking about it now actually, the idea of characters in stories with hidden origin stories…Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the wife in Jane Eyre in the attic which the Wide Sargasso Sea kind of interrogates which is super interesting…Jean Rhys. But in terms of sort of modern passing, I’m not really sure. It was through literature, definitely,” added Ruth Negga, describing her experience with the term. (Rebecca Murray)

De Groene Amsterdammer (Netherlands) asks bookish questions to writer Gustaaf Peek.

Jane Austen of Virginia Woolf?

Charlotte Brontë natuurlijk. Jane Eyre, daar is van alles op aan te merken, maar ik ga volledig plat, elke keer dat ik het lees. (Zed Fasel) (Translation)

Chronicle Live on popular baby names in the UK:

But naming your child after a literary character or icon is not a new trend.

Thomas Hardy's hit Jude the Obscure put the boy's name on the map in the 1800s, and the name Heath has become popular as a shortened version of Emily Brontë's dark and broody love interest in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliffe. In fact, late actor Heath Ledger himself was actually named after Heathcliffe [sic], whilst his sister Kate Ledger was named after the character's love interest Catherine. (Georgia Meadows)

According to Diario Panama, Harvard University recommends reading Jane Eyre.