Review: Wuthering Heights

It was so warm and nice in the morning I thought we were going to have outrageously inappropriate weather, but a cold and wuthering wind kicked up just in time for this the last Mermaids play of the semester, a theatre adaptation of Wuthering Heights. If you asked me to write a theatre adaptation of Wuthering Heights, I would refuse outright. The plot’s too complicated and jumps around everywhere, it’s got this whole weird frame narrative going on, but also I don’t think you could really transfer the overwhelmingly emotionally heightened characters of Catherine and Heathcliff—truly, the Bella and Edward of the 19th century—into a different medium without losing some of their power and ending up a bit more like Twilight in a bad way. My thoughts on that have changed a little bit after watching Director Elise Siddiqui and Producer Felix da Silva Clamp’s lavish production tonight. Of course not everything of this intensely unusual novel can be reproduced onstage, but it is possible to create a different Wuthering Heights that is also good.

You walk into the StAge and immediately see the first unusual thing about this play: a chamber ensemble ready to play live music, conducted by Musical Director Eleanor White and composed by Hannah-Louise Siddiqui. The music set up for all the best and most emotional moments of the play, with some happy little flute trills but more often tense violin tremolos, dramatic piano chords, and even some tapping on the body of the cello. Anything could have been happening on stage and I would have been happy coming just for the concert.

Prologues to plays are all the rage lately and we have one here too: the cast march down to the stage, carrying red glowing lanterns and saying a slightly adapted mixing-together by Elise of some of Emily Brontë’s (very powerful) poetry, enough of which I can hear over the sound of waves and increasingly dramatic music to make out that everyone was pronouncing ‘o’er’ as having two distinct syllables. This deeply troubled me, but not enough to ignore the portentousness as the actors form a descending row of lanterns centre stage with a (presumably Elise-original) final couplet about ‘heights’ and a ‘string of glowing crimson lights’—and then the lanterns stay on stage for the rest of the play looking impressive and fateful. I’m a total sucker for this sort of thing (it’s very easy to write about in a review) and I think it suits the supercharged Gothic vibes of Wuthering Heights very well.

ID:Ona Wright, Ethan Cartwright, and Eilidh Read. Credit: Wuthering Heights Production Team

There’s quite a lot going on in this play. At the back of the stage is a wire fence with ‘no trespassing’ signs and an ivy-lined window in the middle with lacy curtains (all built by Cal O’Neill and Callisto Lodwick), which is used for all sorts of fun entrances. The rest of the set is furniture with naturalistic set dressing, such as Yorkshire tea bags (since we are in Yorkshire) and a radio, with Sound Technician Luke Siever playing radio static over certain important lines, as well as recordings of Eilidh Read’s Catherine’s voice haunting Ona Wright’s Heathcliff, and a short clip describing planned right-to-roam protests. There are a few extremely intensive but impressively well-coordinated (kudos to Stage Manager Heather Tiernan and ASM Sara Whiteman) set changes from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange, which is fundamentally the same vibe but with slightly more black leather (but in fact less kinky). This all loosely creates a setting of modern English campaigning about the freedom to roam, which loosely fits into all the themes of being confined by society and wanting natural freedom in the moors. Rachel Kettlewood’s costuming keeps the play slightly out of time and strict realities of gender norms, with lots of dapper suits and waistcoats, and also Doc Martens which are very nice and have queer implications if I really feel like stretching for it (I do) but I possibly wouldn’t want to wear them rambling in the moors. Luke Lynch’s lighting is mostly in a homely yellow which varies from an extremely warm soothing yellow after Catherine’s marriage to a cold almost-white after her death, occasionally augmented by threatening red light or sickly green, or switching to ominous blue.

Then Ryan Cunningham’s Lockwood comes on with a monologue to introduce us to Wuthering Heights. I’ve already said I wouldn’t adapt this novel, but if I was forced to at gunpoint I would eliminate Lockwood. This at any rate is quite a different Lockwood from Brontë’s—along with his narrative voice is lost the insufferable priggishness and absolute self-assurance, replaced by a slightly anxious general reasonableness and empathy. This makes him easier to anchor onto as relatable, folded in on himself in his big black coat watching almost the entire play in silence—instead of experiencing Brechtian defamiliarisation I mostly glanced at him to see him reacting to things in funny ways, and tried to think of a joke about him being like a reviewer like me. Louise Mountbatten-Windsor plays the other narrator, Nelly, full of strong opinions and harshness, but also motherly care. She has some quite cool smooth integrations between her narrating to Lockwood and her acting within it, for instance talking in sync with other characters’ lines. There are funny pantomime-y moments with these two characters which perhaps take away from the serious strong emotions of the play, such as when Nelly tries to hide the young Hareton (a baby in this adaptation, also making this scene more grotesque) from the drunk and violent Hindley by dropping him behind a chair.

ID: Ona Wright, Eilidh Read, Elodie Bain, Ethan Cartwright, and Sam Morrison. Credit: Wuthering Heights Production Team.

I was never going to be completely happy with an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, but there are some bits of the script here that my defensive change-hating instinct automatically rejects—like some maybe necessary but not very convincing dialogue insertions, most obviously between Catherine and Heathcliff and Edgar, but also extensive cuts, including some of my favourite little moments (like the first time Catherine and Heathcliff meet the Lintons). I've glanced at the book a few times writing this, and somehow this script just does not replicate its power in my head. But of course there are interesting things that can be gained in a theatre: the moors are a completely locked-off space which we never see, playing into the themes of restriction, and there are quite a few things done with people's physical presences and reported speech. Lockwood only reports his experience of being haunted by Catherine to Heathcliff, but that narration makes Eilidh appear as a ghost and enact the experience to both of them, involving both Lockwood's dream and Heathcliff's own memories.

Ethan Cartwright’s Edgar and Elodie Bain’s Isabella are both very posh, and both have scene-stealing moments. They’re cute in their trusting loves for Catherine and Heathcliff, and then very moving in their horror and anger and grief. Freddie Crawford’s grown-up Hareton is matched against Orsolya Haynes’ Cathy, who has some of the play’s rawest moments of pure outrage and anger at the start, before being transformed into a creepily happy (I’m not sure if I only view them as creepy because of my prejudice against straight people) absurd couple at the end, with Freddie holding Orsi in his lap, teaching him to read and being kissed by him. There’s a lot of touching and kissing in this play, and it’s all executed very naturally—credit to Intimacy Coordinator Lila Patterson. Sam Morrison threateningly hisses his lines as a quite sympathetic Hindley, overcome by despair and futilely striking out. Jack Dams’ Joseph is mostly outrageous comic relief, which is probably inevitable with his bow-legs and overplayed dialect, but he also has genuinely terrifying moments when the music swells and he quotes his Bible verses portending doom. I should mention that most of the actors attempt Northern accents, which I am too Received Pronunciation to properly gauge the level of offensiveness of—no-one will be accused of being from Surrey in this review—but isn’t it funny that I’m Southern English and in Scotland judging mostly Southern English people with RP accents on their attempts at minority accents strongly associated with class, and so is most of the audience and this is just the way it is here.

But you’re reading this for Catherine and Heathcliff and for me to be like O.M.G. they’re gay—which they are. Their relationship is easily applicable to queerness for the same reasons that all Gothic fiction has historically appealed to queer people, and the slight queering of Catherine and Heathcliff fits completely naturally into their characters. They have opposing themed colours—Eilidh is white and green or teal, down to the bootlaces, and Ona is black and red, matching her (exquisite) hair—which makes for very aesthetic moments as they embrace before Catherine’s death. They’re always moving in and out of touching each other and bumping foreheads and holding each others’ hands, and this short moment of intertwining was so sensitive and romantic and moving (obviously I found it more moving because it was queer), with Eilidh chaotic in just a chemise contrasted against Ona’s very ordered Heathcliff in a slick black suit. ‘Very ordered Heathcliff’ feels like a strange phrase to write, but that’s how it is: this Heathcliff is more often tired of it all, with knowing glances to the audience, than impotently furious; and then is slyly manipulative and in control, easily flipping Hindley in the multiple fight scenes. Much pure rage is saved for Catherine’s death, and despair, where Ona stares madly and shakes and staggers with impressive emotion. All the wildness then is saved for Eilidh’s Catherine, who dominates most of the play. She is almost always in motion—except when she isn’t (only the highest-quality criticism here), in some of her most moving moments still on the chaise-longue or looking yearningly out of the window—energetic, making sure to get her own way, and usually shouting, though not without some quiet little smiles at Heathcliff. She is very sympathetic in all her extreme emotions, her sulking ‘now I’ll cry’, her stumbling over herself in anxiety, her misery, and her frustrated, sometimes sadistic anger. I was worried that I would struggle to empathise with and get into a theatre version of Catherine, but I shouldn’t have been. Overall this was a very exciting and entertaining night, with so many little points of interest.

So that was the last play of the year! I say ‘was’—you can and should still buy tickets for the second night. But the cogs of the great Mermaids theatre machine are already turning to start work on the next. It’s been a brilliant semester for theatre, and also a surprisingly quite queer one (at least surprising to grumpy old me). I hope, but doubt, that I will see another semester have as many plays with queer representation (however limited) as this in my time here.
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