Emily Brontë is not boring; Jane Eyre is not autistic

The Times' review of Inspector Sands's production of Wuthering Heights couldn't be more different from yesterday's in The Guardian. According to The Times, which gives it a meagre 2 stars out of 5, 'they’ve made Brontë boring' (which is indeed a serious accusation).

It’s Emily Brontë’s great story, just not quite as you know it. The trouble is, after well over two hours of this part-gothic, part-larky, part-modernist, part-trad Wuthering Heights you end up not knowing what it is instead.

It isn’t just that the ins and outs of the Earnshaws and the Lintons feel so stubbornly convoluted. Even a joke about how similar all their names are can’t stop that being a problem. It’s more that this adventurous yet scattershot endeavour by the theatre company Inspector Sands, presented with Royal & Derngate, China Plate and Oxford Playhouse, leaves you wondering what you are supposed to feel about any of the characters.

Perhaps it’s unfortunate that it follows so soon after Emma Rice’s successful stage version of the story at the National and on tour. Nobody else should try to do it in Rice’s style, but she found playful ways to give a flavour of the Moors, a vivid sense of rapture and of resentment, particularly between Catherine Earnshaw and her adoptive brother Heathcliff.

Here, the show’s co-devisers Lucinka Eisler (director) and Ben Lewis (writer) centre everything indoors. The housekeeper Nelly Dean, the book’s narrator, becomes the pivotal character. Her kitchen table dominates Jamie Vartan’s split-level set, and Giulia Innocenti gives a stand-out performance in the role. Yet should she figure this strongly when the pivotal relationship between Catherine (Lua Bairstow) and Heathcliff (Ike Bennett) barely has room to register? Bennett is a muted presence as Heathcliff, and without more between the pair, with precious little sense of desire or rage, it all feels hopelessly vague.

Yes, moment by moment the show always has something going for it. Recorded voices, or the characters themselves sometimes count forward through the years from 1771. They wear modern dress, or period garb, or mix the two. Leander Deeny, who plays Catherine’s fancypants husband, Edgar, sticks on a superhero eye visor and spangly cape to become her daughter’s unsuitable beloved, Linton. There’s a neat knife-throwing moment, bursts of modern songs, and a fine, smoky feel to it courtesy of the lighting designer Ben Ormerod. There are lines straight from the book, plus some modern swearing, plus some moments of dark wit. (Dominic Maxwell)

Northampton Chronicle and Echo reviews it too.

Passion. Violence. Revenge. These are the evocative traits associated with Emily Brontës literary classic Wuthering Heights. Humour? Less so.

And yet the raw, unflinching stage adaptation, brought to Royal & Derngate by theatre company Inspector Sands, rains down a torrent of deliciously dark comedy which is wildly entertaining.

Rather than wallow in the bleak Yorkshire setting, writer and director Ben Lewis and Lucinka Eisler have somehow managed to create an adaptation which is hysterically funny whilst sensitively tackling tumultuous themes of emotional hysteria.

Framed by unreliable narrator Nelly (Guilia Innocent), maid to the Wuthering Heights household, the plot chooses to focus on dysfunctional family relationships, class and racism, rather than hone in on the love story of Catherine and Heathcliff.

Whilst this may not be the Wuthering Heights I remember studying at university, it captures the intensity, melodrama and heartbreaking destruction of the 19th century classic.

The wind howls, the lights flicker and the horror of the Earnshaw and Linton households unfolds at a rapid pace, in large part due to the gripping performance by Innocent. Meanwhile her surrounding cast play multiple roles with John Askew particularly mesmerising as Hindley/Hareton. (Lily Canter)

The Telegraph states that, 'Forcing medical labels onto fictional heroes isn’t the way to fight stigma'.

Google “is Jane Eyre autistic?” and countless articles, blogs and message boards will confirm that she is, with one citing as evidence the fact that Charlotte Brontë’s heroine cannot stand a “prolonged effusion of small talk”. (Celia Walden)