Too loose to convince as Byronic bad boy

The Guardian gives 2 stars out of 5 to Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned, summing it up as 'part Dracula, part Jeeves and Wooster'.

Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.

As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.

Hirani puts undeniable effort in getting her plot points to line up with Brontë’s – even if most of the characters, including poor old Lockwood’s horse, meet a much grislier fate. Rationed out in snippets of Catherine’s diary, the confidences of housekeeper Nelly (Nicola Wright) and more random supernatural flashbacks involving Lockwood, the manor’s backstory is rather garbled, though with the OTT hook of Heathcliff as an 18th-century Yorkshire Ripper. Rather than amping up the camp, as the likes of Kate Bush and Emerald Fennell did in their takes on the novel, Hirani plays it straight and dour, mystifyingly so, given the extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork-impalings she’s chucked in.

At the same time, diffident acting undermines the film’s claim as pure slasher fare: Townsend-Green’s jumpy turn feels as if he has strayed out of Jeeves and Wooster, while, despite the Rasputin looks, windy-voiced Cheema is too loose to convince as Byronic bad boy. For much of the runtime, we’re left with too little that makes his conversion to homicidal mania credible, until the last-minute lowdown on his Hellraiser-like scheme for his ward, Cathy (Anna Coupé). Reanimating the corpse of Brontë in this rickety way, this update not only feels pointless, but short on self-awareness or fun. (Phil Hoad)

CharlesHutchPress gives 4 stars to Underdog: The Other Other Brontë at Theatre@41 in York.

That said, Gordon counters the narrator’s status by showing the ambitious, ruthless, envious Charlotte in anything but the best light, full of withering slights and maternally over-protective of Anne in particular, refusing permission for a posthumous re-print of The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall (and editing Emily’s poems for publication after her death to boot).

Jess Murray’s Emily is an undiluted firebrand, with a temper and potty mouth, but somewhat underwritten by comparison with Anne and especially Charlotte.

Nick Patrick Jones’s Branwell can be heard shouting at his father in the background and in his infrequent appearances he feels like a ghost in this play, even before he is consigned to that status.

Alongside Jones, Jon Cook, Pamela Gourley and Maggie Smales are on multi-rolling duty, Smales taking the honours with her spoilt child, coconut-clip-clopping carriage driver and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell.

Claire Morley’s witty, wily and waspish production is played out with fiery pace and passion on Richard Hampton’s three-sided set of suspended wheat sheafs, page after page torn from books, three boxes bedecked in yet more words and the backdrop of a frame filled with flowers.

At its base is a sign reading “Liar” that Stafford’s Charlotte then places around the neck of Rhodes’s Anne, and yet not everything that Charlotte says can be taken as the truth. Literary licence, maybe; playwright’s impish, knowing humour, certainly.

The sisters are even more fun company than in Lip Service’s Withering Looks, full of surprises, sassy putdowns (not least of Jane Austen’s face being on a bank note) and sisterly interplay, played out to a soundtrack of Self Esteem, Charlie XCX and Billie Eilish snippets.  It could have been deeper, it could have been darker,  but that is the one story that has been told before.

On reflection, all the Brontë sisters can be seen as the underdog of the title, sisters with blisters, but fighting against cramped writing conditions, the Yorkshire chill that did for their health, and the inequality and cold shoulder of the book world’s stuffed shirts. The “other” here is as much the other side of their story as a desire to put Anne in the spotlight.

“Young women judge older women more harshly than anybody else…they are conditioned to,” says the spiky Charlotte, in one of her jibes delivered so deliciously by Stafford, whose outstanding performance is befitting of a professional stage.

Derbyshire Life features the wonderful artist Frances Featherstone.

‘We moved to Derbyshire when I was 11, so I never took it for granted.

‘As a teenager I romanticised the views. Artistically, I loved the idea of a solitary figure against these dramatic backdrops. I studied romanticism at school and college and loved stories like Jane Eyre. I’ve carried that through into my painting in more recent years; the focus on a solitary figure. I think my paintings are quite romantic, but they’re set within the home, with these fabrics and patterns as backdrops rather than sweeping landscape views.

‘We used to go rock climbing at Stanage Edge, and Black Rocks near Matlock, which I still do sometimes when I go home to visit my mum or dad.

‘Who knows – perhaps having that perspective of climbing up and looking straight down from a height has also subconsciously influenced my more recent paintings.’ (Laura Wells)

The Yorkshire Post has an article on Haworth's Christmas market. Alta recommends '17 Haunting Books to Read This October' including Wuthering Heights.