So to watch an international artist of Rice’s stature, and her full ensemble-driven company, wrestle with a masterpiece as multifaceted and complicated as “Wuthering Heights” is a delight. That pleasure is intensified by the clear link between Rice’s approach, which is to deconstruct the work’s typical association with repressed sexual desire in favor of exploring its broader socioeconomic milieu, with innovations born in Chicago. Not only does Rice use a lot of the techniques associated with the late, great Frank Galati and Northwestern University, but the theater ecosystem has also passed along a lot of the ideas from companies like the Neo-Futurists, who long specialized in making the mechanics of making theater out of works like this as transparent as possible. As one example, Rice uses chalkboards to indicate when one of Brontë’s characters has died: I remember seeing the Neo-Futurists do precisely that some 20 years ago.So what are you getting here exactly? A cheerfully anachronistic and self-aware exploration of the novel, replete with live music, composed by Ian Ross. It’s going too far to call the show a musical or folk opera, but it’s very much a show with music. There’s a variety of media from live actors to puppets. And the show inhabits Rice’s signature aesthetic position: a refusal to be fully sold on what the material is widely assumed to be, but nonetheless fascinated by its place in popular consciousness. So if you’re expecting a full-on romantic bath of all the typical Brontë feels, you’ll likely be disappointed. If you’re ready to think about what was really going on in and around “Wuthering Heights,” you’ll find much of interest and provocation.The actors, including Katy Ellis, who has recently taken over the role of Catherine, Lloyd Gorman who plays Mr. Earnshaw, and the droll TJ Holmes, who played Dr. Holmes Friday night, are generally excellent: Eleanor Sutton,who plays Catherine Linton, rises even above that. I found Liam Tamne, the brooding fellow who essays Heathcliff, less than accessible at times, which might sound true to type but is not entirely true in this production. Most in the cast, also enhanced greatly by Tama Phethean, play several roles and they do so with great skill and commitment; Ellis got better and better as the night went on and her character sunk further and further into the mist.Know that the show is long; Brontë’s intergenerational saga is not easily wrestled into postmodern compliance. On opening night, the show was made yet longer by an unscheduled Act 1 stop to sort out a backstage problem, or so I was told, but even on a regular performance, we’re pushing three hours as characters live and die, mostly unhappily. “Wuthering Heights” has a lot of twists, and there are things for which Rice has a plethora of great ideas, and other moments when it feels like she is just getting as expeditiously as possible to the next crisis of heart and soul.Understandably so. I was profoundly glad for the challenge to try and keep up with all the ideas and feelings in the mist. (Chris Jones)
Little of that is apparent in the Wise Children theater company’s nearly three-hour staging of “Wuthering Heights” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.Adapted and directed by Wise Children artistic director Emma Rice, “Wuthering Heights” swings without structure or seeming intent between camp worthy of a ’70s sitcom and attempts at straight-for-the-gut straight drama. Neither works very well.Between the two extremes, Rice’s adaptation muddles Brontë’s story to the point of incomprehensibility, despite the cast whimsically brandishing chalkboards and periodically providing direct-address tutorials on the tangled family trees of the dozen-or-so characters in the mostly double- and triple-cast (plus a few puppets) production. [...]Subtly is not part of Rice’s staging. Cathy and Heathcliff, for example, literally wear leaf crowns in the first act, hammering home their wild natures with all the nuance of a felled redwood.Nor are there any subtleties of character. To a one, Rice has her cast playing not human beings but cartoons, their characters as broad as a Yorkshire fen. The buffoonery alternates with jarring moments of brutal violence (bone-crunching fight choreo by Kev McCurdy), both elements combining to create disjointed aesthetic that doesn’t serve the story.As generations shift and patterns of childhood escapades and romance repeat, “Wuthering Heights” becomes nonsensical and dull. Cathy and Heathcliff are vile and cruel as Heathcliff’s varied tormentors, rendering one of the world’s great love stories profoundly unpleasant.By the third or so time the chalk boards come out and the cast again explains how various Lintons and Earnshaws are cousins/in-laws/betrothed/widowed/otherwise entangled, it’s tough to care.Vicki Mortimer’s minimalist set design is dominated by a large backdrop where projections of whirling clouds and driving rain frame the cast, and wooden chairs, built into tree-sized, ladder-like contraptions that the cast wheels about and clambers over throughout. Mortimer’s costume design is perplexing. There are elaborate period details (Edgar Linton’s fussy dress coat) on some garments, and things that make no sense (the town doctor pairs tails with kelly-green dish gloves, evoking Jiminy Cricket) on others. Cathy’s garments go from 19th century tomboy to ’80s prom queen.There is music throughout, composed by Ian Ross and predominantly deployed as a five-piece onstage band accompanies a Greek chorus of singing, dancing “moors.” Cathy gets a growling rock solo. The lyrics, as throughout, were primarily unintelligible, although Ellis delivers Cathy’s repeated refrain of “I am the earth” with increasing Billy Idol-esque ferocity.The music could be an asset, but the vocals opening night were not. Consistently muddied lyrics and dubious pitch issues might have been technical: The show was halted mid-scene roughly 45 minutes in, for reasons that were never explained. Then again, there was no notable improvement when things restarted. [...]Opt for the source material instead. (Catey Sullivan)
I know it was wet and cold, but the rain cast an eerie, Brontë-esque mist onto the moors that allowed me to practise my best Kate Bush impression by singing Wuthering Heights at the top of my voice. As I say, it’s always a treat to see family. Not sure the feeling is mutual. (Beth Abbit)
‘Wuthering Heights’ – Kate BushSometimes the greenness of teenage naivety is essential in shifting the course of history. Any savvy songwriter in their 20s would’ve known that to come out wailing in a whirl of flowery mysticism at the height of the snarling uproar of punk was sure to be a juxtaposed misfire. The critics proved them right, when Kate Bush arrived with her literary anthem, ‘Wuthering Heights’, that she wrote as an 18-year-old, the Guardian called her an “odd combo of artiness and artlessness,” and the NME said “[Kate Bush] has all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era.” (Tom Taylor)
Described as “an exquisite, eloquent ode to the classics”, the story follows Brontë Ellis, an orphan raised with chilly indifference at an all-boys boarding school. Stifled by rigid rules, he is forbidden from expressing his genuine gender identity, until a position as a live-in tutor provides a welcome escape.The synopsis adds: “Greenwood Manor is the elegant Cambridgeshire country house Bron has only seen in his beloved books, and amid lavish parties and cricket matches the Edwards family welcomes him, accepting that his gender presentation is not traditionally masculine. All but Darcy, the eldest son, who seems uncomfortable with Bron, and the strange tension between them is palpable.“When a tragic fire burns through the idyllic peace of Greenwood Manor, Bron begins to sense dark secrets smouldering beneath the surface as he sifts through the wreckage, and soon is not sure what to believe – especially when his growing attraction to Darcy clouds his vision. Filled with warmth and wit uniquely its own, fans of Lex Croucher’s Reputation (St Martin’s Griffin) and André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (Atlantic Books) will adore this contemporary queer homage to classic literature."Castle, an editor at Pan Macmillan who was a finalist in the 2016/17 cohort of Penguin’s WriteNow scheme, said: “I am so glad that The Manor House Governess is going to be published by Black and White, and for readers to finally meet Bron, who has kept me company for years and seen me through some difficult times. I started writing this novel during my MPhil at the University of Cambridge — I was so inspired by my academic studies and the city I was living in. It is an exploration of how my reading and viewing habits shaped my own gender fluid identity; how queer love is everywhere, if you know where to look, as well as a love letter to Jane Eyre and the period dramas I grew up with.”Brown said: “The Manor House Governess is a joy of a novel, and we are thrilled to be publishing it here in the UK. A contemporary, eloquently written ode to the likes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, it’s also an uplifting story on the importance of self-expression.” (Lauren Brown)
Karl Marx was one of the greatest intellectuals of the nineteenth century. He was also one of its greatest writers. Like Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and the Brontë sisters, Marx looms large among the peaks of nineteenth-century prose. (Daniel Hartley)
A wealthy woman composes a suicide note by the light of a Christmas tree and then jumps out the window of her palatial Manhattan apartment. Six months later, her kindly widower hires a recent college grad to care for their little boy. It’s a live-in position; in this old-fashioned luxury building, The Greybourne, nannies get their own cramped, dusty quarters on the top floor.It’s a premise fit for a 21st-century tale of gothic horror—a contemporary answer to Jane Eyre or The Turn of the Screw, perhaps. But it’s also only the tiniest tip of the iceberg that is The Watchful Eye, a wickedly addictive domestic thriller that debuts Jan. 30 on Freeform (episodes will hit Hulu the day after they air). (Judy Berman)
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