Emily Brontë’s gothic romance is so often cleansed of its darkest elements, from violent family abuse and animal torture to necrophilia and murderous desire.
This gloriously imaginative co-production, adapted by Ben Lewis and Lucinka Eisler, digs up all the death-obsessed, savage melodrama of the original love story between Catherine (Lua Bairstow) and Heathcliff (Ike Bennett), and adds its own killer ingredient: coal black humour. It works stupendously to create awful, awkward laughter.
Created by Inspector Sands, a company that combines comedy with pathos, the humour is a few shades darker than Emma Rice’s recent, charming production. Where that satirised characters fondly, the comedy has sharper teeth here.
Heathcliff is unyielding and perpetually vengeful, while Catherine is an abrasive, spirited, social climber. Their passion does not smoulder enough, and Heathcliff is too baby-faced to be truly threatening, but they carry the selfish strains that make their love so destructive. The end romance between Hareton (John Askew) and Young Cathy (Nicole Sawyerr) feels truly tender by comparison.
Directed by Eisler, six actors perform multiple roles, each with great artfulness. As the drama’s outsider, Heathcliff is emphatically Black, called a “slave boy” and speaking in an African accent when he is first scooped off the streets of Liverpool and brought home by Earnshaw (Leander Deeny). Catherine, meanwhile, changes her own broad Yorkshire accent after she has met the well-to-do Linton (also Deeny), to gesture at the story’s class conflict.
The play captures the visionary postmodernism of Brontë’s text too in its layered and unreliable narration. Nelly (Giulia Innocenti, brilliant) is central here. Voiceovers are also used, which sound strained at first, but they carry their own intelligent logic. Sometimes the production feels too messy and melodramatic, but even that replicates the sprawling, uncontained spirit of the book.
A stark set, designed by Jamie Vartan and consisting of just a kitchen table and a ladder, against pitch black, creates an elemental atmosphere alongside the caw of birds, the howl of wind, odd knocks and thumps (co-sound designers Elena Peña and Dan Balfour). The blustery moors are not seen but conveyed through movement, which is beautifully orchestrated on the whole: embraces turn into pushes while the lighting fixture is violently swung by actors to create a visual tumult that gestures towards emotional disturbance, but also shows the drama’s artifice.
Both silly and deadly serious to the end, this is Wuthering Heights with its jagged edges restored, full of moroseness but weirdly, wonderfully, entertaining.
Until 6 May, then touring
