'What Cathy is going through is essentially a nervous breakdown'

The Independent talks to Lucy MacCormick Cathy in Emma Rice’s Wuthering Heights.

“Quite a few people kept saying to me: ‘Oh, are you going to sing that song? The Kate Bush song?’” laughs McCormick, whose risqué, in-your-face hit solo shows often involve bursting into song. “I was like, ‘Um, no. That would be really cringe. This is a legitimate acting job.’”

The casting makes sense. In her live shows, the actor and performance artist is feral, brazen and provocative – quite unlike her gentler and more vulnerable real self, as she natters away like a long-lost friend from her flat in London’s Woolwich. [...]

 “What Cathy is going through is essentially a nervous breakdown,” she explains. “I’ve always been drawn to tragic characters. In my shows, I’m trying to figure out the tragedy of life, and doing that through comedy.”

Emma Rice’s production opens at Bristol Old Vic later this month before touring to the National Theatre. McCormick describes it as “brilliantly camp and theatrical… drama with a big ‘D’”. It has a big crossover, she adds, with her own work – “balancing the tragic and the comic and finding a certain kind of irreverence”.

She’s trying not to overthink the famous role – and instead, to bring herself to it. “The character is a lesson really in sort of repressed emotion,” she explains, “and lying to yourself, and having too much pride.” Cathy betrays herself and Heathcliff by marrying Edgar Linton – despite knowing Heathcliff is her “soulmate”, as McCormick puts it. “It’s also true, of course, that she is trapped in a patriarchal system. And she feels that she doesn’t really have that many choices. But it was interesting to me that she doesn’t repent for a lot of really awful behaviour.” [...]

Wuthering Heights is Rice’s fifth production: it’s an all-singing, all-dancing show, but “very much inspired by the period”, says McCormick, with an ensemble playing the Yorkshire moors “like a Greek chorus”.

It’s only to be expected that McCormick has an off-beat moment when she breaks into a rock song, “Look Up”. It happens around the time of Cathy’s famous speech: “I am Heathcliff! Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“She’s grappling with the decision she’s made [to marry Linton],” says McCormick. “It feels like this exorcism. And then it goes back into the story and back into the kind of more quiet music.” (Charlotte Cripps)

In The Guardian, Mary Beard writes about the books of her life.

My favourite book growing up

It depends what you mean by growing up … I still am. But if you are taking me back to school, I would say Jane Eyre. I am not sure that I’m entirely proud of the way I engaged with it. I empathised with “Reader, I married him” a bit too strongly. But it made its mark. When I was about 10 I was determined to learn it off by heart, but sadly only made it to page three.

Naples Daily News interviews romance writer Tara September, who claims that,

"A lot of people think so badly on the genre when it has been around since the 1800s," she complained.

 "I think it's easy to poke fun at happy-ever-afters. I think there's some sexism involved, too, because no one would make fun of a man reading an action story where he has to save the whole world from this bomb and he decodes it. That's just as much escapism as romance is."

September has been an unapologetic supporter of the genre all her life. Pasted atop  her undergraduate-degree mortarboard were covers of "Jane Eyre," — "which was early romance," she noted —"Pride and Prejudice" and "The Color Purple." (Harriet Howard Heithaus)

Wuthering Heights is one of 8 romantic novels whose every page will move you according to Galileu (Brazil).

1. O morro dos ventos uivantes - a partir de R$ 11

Lançado em 1847 e tendo se tornado um dos maiores clássicos da literatura inglesa de todos os tempos, O morro dos ventos uivantes foi o único romance escrito pela autora Emily Brontë. Chegando ao Brasil pela primeira vez em 1938, por meio da publicação da Editora Globo, a obra já teve várias adaptações na televisão, no cinema e até mesmo no mundo da música, como o álbum Wind and Wuthering, da banda britânica Genesis, e a música Wuthering Heights, gravada pela banda brasileira Angra. (Nalu Dias) (Translation)

InsideHook has an article on actor Timothy Dalton and reminds readers of the fact that he played two Brontë characters.

Rather, a precocious lover of Victorian literature if not Ian Fleming novels, I fell for Dalton thanks to his portrayal of not one but two iconic Brontë antiheroes in film adaptations of their 19th-century Gothic masterpieces. In one of his earliest screen roles, Dalton first stole my heart as the haunted, grim and borderline sociopathic Heathcliff in the 1970 adaptation of Emily  Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — a role first played by Golden Age leading man Laurence Olivier in 1939. Thirteen years later, Dalton starred as the brooding Mr. Rochester in the 1983 BBC miniseries based on Charlotte Brontë’s classic, Jane Eyre.

It was in these roles — roles for which Dalton, himself, would probably rather be remembered, but which have been largely overshadowed by his divisive James Bond stint — that I first fell for him: the “consistently lean,” “green-eyed” leading man hailed in a particularly horny IMDb bio as “one of the last of the dying breed of swashbuckling, classically trained Shakespearean actors who have forged simultaneous successful careers in theater, television and film.” (Kayla Kibbe)

Stereogum shares a video of Carly Rae Jepsen doing a cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.