giving if 4 stars out of 5.
In a typically kick-ass Northern Stage production, director Natalie Ibu brings the women to vivid, raucous life with the simplest theatrical elements: a wild garden that rises to reveal a bare stage beneath, music hall knockabout, coconut halves for horses hooves and audience engagement.
“What’s your favourite Brontë novel?” challenges scarlet-clad Charlotte (Gemma Whelan) on her entrance as we wonder whether to risk saying Wuthering Heights instead of Jane Eyre.
After their brother Branwell’s (James Phoon) death, Charlotte’s bullies youngest sister Anne (Rhiannon Clements) without mercy, belittling her attempt at being a governess for the ghastly children of the local gentry.
Meanwhile, Emily (Adele James) acts as mediator between the two. They act out parts of their novels to each other - the sequence dramatising Anne’s torrid Gothic romance The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is hilarious.
The real test comes when the London publishers react to the idea that women are capable of writing commercially viable novels.
Arresting performances from Whelan as the deeply unsympathetic Charlotte, Clements as the independent-but-withdrawn Anne and James as the stoical Emily keep Gordon’s spirited play alight.
It uncovers the flesh and blood females behind the Brontë myth while interrogating entrenched patriarchy in a broad satire punctuated with amusing anachronistic dialogue.
It left me aching to get my hands on a copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall asap. (Neil Norman)
But over a century ago, Emily Brontë crafted a new language around fictional first loves, one that wasn’t so frothy, one that was muscular and angry. Set on the wild moorland, Wuthering Heights follows Cathy and Heathcliff across 30 years as they traverse the craggy hills and valleys of North Yorkshire. They grow into and around one another like thistles spurting up, constricting until any life is choked out, thick and heady enough to block out the sunny promise of “happily ever after.”
Cathy and Heathcliff are shorthand for a kind of unruly, death-defying epic love—grittier and muddier than Romeo and Juliet, more animalistic than Darcy and Elizabeth. William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights knows of their larger-than-life reputation, crafting something worthy of its otherworldly size. Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier are a perfect blend of unsubtle choices as Cathy and Heathcliff; both performers are unafraid of facing one another, eyes swimming, locked in the intensity of the moment (and all the Cathy-Heathcliff moments that have come before).
Midway through this film, Heathcliff is the soot-covered outcast, lumbering around Wuthering Heights, working for free. Cathy is doll-like and delicate, no longer the maddeningly confident young girl. When her abusive brother Hindley (Hugh Williams) leaves the house, she dashes outside, galloping past Heathcliff, fixed on the sky and sinking into the horizon. He looks up, and the corners of his mouth are pinned to his ears, his brow is lifted, his cumbersome frame suddenly light. They are children again, channeling the younger performers we first saw play the characters. For a brief, flashing moment, Olivier even looks like Rex Downing (the younger Heathcliff), nimble and slight, all crunched features and teeth. Maybe they are not submitting to time. Maybe time is submitting to them.
In one of the book’s most famous lines, Cathy reflects on their tempestuous dynamic: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” It is the line that launched a thousand—probably more like a million—ships (e.g. Etsy tote bags and notebooks for moody teenagers newly acquainted with classic literature). It is also ominous, a cryptically designed warning. Pronouns are positioned in concentric patterns—“our” is sandwiched between “he” and “I” because that is the shape of their relationship. They are brought together only to push apart. It has been read as a romantic declaration, but really it is a bit of gothic foreshadowing. From this point on, their fate is sealed, and it is up to filmmakers to ascertain the “whatever” Cathy speaks of; every subsequent version of this story is dedicated to defining the new texture of this ugly love.
In her controversial 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold uses her brand of stark naturalism to ground Cathy and Heathcliff’s love in the muck and mire of the English countryside. In her retelling, this is the feel of their love: Grimy and seeping, stuck underneath their fingernails and behind their ears. Wyler argues that there is something inkier, darker that gurgles between them. While Arnold largely discounts the actual structure of Wuthering Heights, investing in its wild surroundings, the 1939 version locks much of the plot within the shadowy structure itself, confining action to musty corners. Throughout, love is the force unforgivingly bearing down on the couple, keeping them locked in the dark. [...]
Wuthering Heights’ legacy stretches forward in fascinating ways, not just ensuring that a style of gothic love story remains in vogue, but encouraging fiction to blur the lines between romance and horror. Wyler intimately understands this oxymoron, embodying it in markedly simple ways, through employing skilled actors and crafting real sets. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera (and the subsequent Joel Schumacher film) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and the subsequent Francis Ford Coppola film) both frame a love triangle that veers wildly between sex and romance, day and night, death and life.
Despite its misgivings, Twilight feels like the most obvious inheritor of Cathy and Heathcliff’s legacy. Wuthering Heights is described as Bella’s favorite book, a text she fervently refers back to (while author Stephanie Meyer labeled Wuthering Heights as an explicit influence on the third book, Eclipse). The series imagined what it would mean if someone you loved wanted to kill you, making the ugly, potent relationship between a relationship’s end and beginning explicit. And through an excessive amount of blood and a moody, blue-tinted filter, the films made this dynamic gory, garish and near.
Wuthering Heights has a long and prickly onscreen history, affirming and reiterating its cultural staying power. Hollywood has been refitting this story for different formats, diluting and reemphasizing the violence that simmers beneath depending on the era and the audience. For Brontë and her interpreters, the thrill of young love is a sensation to fear rather than yearn for. (Anna McKibbin)
Singer Lily Fontaine has post-punk’s natural knack for witty, whimsical lyrics that still manage to say something: about politics, race, regional inequality, the climate crisis, you name it, even if the band themselves are less hard to define by genre. On The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, she powers through a list of Northern names who once made the news, for good or bad (Charlotte Brontë, the Life on Mars actor John Simm, a BNP terrorist who was arrested in Leeds in 2006). Fontaine leans into the obvious wink of the track’s metaphor about living life in the background (or should I say underfoot) before eventually having enough: “Watch your f—ing feet!” she warns. (Neil McCormick and Poppie Platt)
BBC has a one-minute clip on the forthcoming restoration of the Brontë Birthplace.
Artnet has an article on the art-inspired names of
Mercury's craters and yes, Brontë is one of them too.
Offaly Live also shares the programme of next weekend's Brontë Festival.
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