Inspector Sands’ new adaptation of Wuthering Heights opened last month to largely positive reviews, and this week, takes up lodging in the Playhouse. I decided to go see what the fuss is about. The show opens with a haunted housekeeper, Ellen ‘Nelly’ Dean (Guilia Innocenti) peeling carrots in a darkened room. Nelly was housekeeper to Master Earnshaw (Leander Deeny) from a young age and helped raise his daughter Cathy (Lua Bairstow) after her mother died, alongside Earnshaw’s son, Hindley (John Askew, excellent). Now Nelly works for Heathcliff (Ian Bennett), Earnshaw’s other, adopted son, whom she proclaims to be a ‘monster’. A sly, provoking voiceover (uncredited) compels her to explain how she got here. And so, were given the first half of the show: a retelling of the sordid events of the past thirty years at Wuthering Heights.
To reflect this psychic distance, there are almost no scene changes in the first half of the show, an extended sequence which is manic and beautifully synchronised.
Right from the start, the humour is loud and broad, compiled through interjections from the winking voiceover, swearing, and flights into zany panto-style acting. This element sometimes layers well with the frequent violence and tragedy, but often the warmth and silliness mixed uneasily with these chilling dramatic moors. Granted, a humourless Wuthering Heights adaptation would be almost unbearably bleak, but it made me curious to see a more droll, blackly comic adaptation, which trusted the audience to make their own meaning a bit more.
Violence, of which there is a lot, is highly stylised, with punches thrown and absorbed from across the table or standing in parallel doorways. The commitment to this is what makes it work. There’s visual shorthand throughout, with minimal set changes and props. And passing years are conveyed not through scene changes but rather in a montage of movement and voiceover counting them (‘1776, 1777…’) This made me think of a dress-up box in a way, of kids crafting a narrative out of what they had on hand. Ironically, this effortlessness belies the labour that it must have taken to make these sequences flow. The reward here is the absorbing paciness in the first half - granted not all the emotional beats land, but there is truly never a dull moment.
Isabella and Edward (Nicole Sawyerr and Leander Deeny, again), are neighbours to the Earnshaws and are introduced as stereotypically stupid rich kids, attempting to choreograph a shockingly bad dance number to a 2000s pop song, one of several semi-successful but unexplained infusions of modern pop culture into the play. Comic relief characters, there’s something deliberately gauche about their performances. For Isabella, the caricatured characterization confuses her role later, which for the sake of the plot becomes wholly serious and dramatic.
Linton, meanwhile, becomes Cathy’s love interest/Heathcliff’s romantic rival. In some productions, Linton is played as a timid but upstanding figure who simply has nothing in common with Cathy, and yet here he’s hopelessly a caricature of an upper-class twit. This is a shame because while it gathers some easy laughter, it steals weight from Cathy’s fraught decision of whether or not to marry him.
The issue is there is nowhere to rest. The significance of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship got a bit lost amongst the noise of the plot. This is a problem, as it arguably needs to be the emotional ballast in this stormy story.
It’s like being handed an abundantly detailed tableau and only limited time to see it: you’re never quite sure where you’re supposed to be looking. There’s a family tree on the wall with photos of the characters, almost like a detective’s board of suspects. Each time a character dies or is born, they remove themselves or add an image to the board. In addition to being a nice stylistic choice, this is genuinely helpful, because there is an avalanche of deaths and births throughout the plot.
Playing the youngest version of their characters, Bairstow as Cathy and Bennett as Heathcliff manage to capture the innocence of childhood beautifully. In young Cathy, you can also see a brashness and jealousy that shimmers with the potential for capricious cruelty. Bairstow’s performance generally felt ideally suited to the production: her ability to infuse dramatics with sincerity grounded and enriched her character.
Bennett’s young Heathcliff comes across as warmly empathetic, which helps in underlining the hurt the family’s betrayals cause, but later works against him as his character is entirely subsumed by rage and revenge. While you’re told frequently of Heathcliff’s many acts of monstrousness, such as killing his wife’s dog, the sound doesn’t always match the mouth moving. There’s a Gatsby-ish charm and cool calculation to Bennett’s later Heathcliff that doesn’t conjure the character’s purportedly unhinged mentality, a viciousness we saw more effectively embodied by Earnshaw, and later, his son Hindley.
The early moments of the play are some of its strongest. In the cruel and commanding Earnshaw, prone to fits of drunken rage and frequently neglectful of his children after their mother’s death, we see a toxic role model for Cathy and Hindley and a household whose material comfort and emotional poverty creates a breeding ground for paranoia. Hindley, a wildly insecure but sensitive young boy torments Heathcliff, his adopted brother, seeing him as a rival to his father’s affections. Later, Hindley turns into a cruel, authoritarian drunk himself, his barbarism masked and corralled under upper-crust airs. As much as Wuthering Heights is about desire, it’s also about class as a stick to beat others down with and the bitter nature of hierarchy.
In the moment where the actors abandon pantomime for drama, the acting is still (deliberately) unrealistic. Instead, the actors take on a kind of Brecht-style deliberate staginess. Brechtian technique revolves around the idea that the audience should be aware at all times that what they are viewing is a construction of reality, not reality itself. Rather than impersonate, the actors are there to narrate the character’s actions. I’m not sure how well this style fits with a story that’s all about personal hurt, unmet needs and roiling desires. I wanted to be inside the head of at least one of the characters, and at times I felt this show was resolutely impenetrable.
Nelly, the housekeeper who acts as a confidant to nearly every other character yet is also their punching bag, should be as drenched in pathos as the others. After all, this is both literally and arguably, emotionally, Nelly’s story. But she’s portrayed as almost a sort of blank canvas. Innocenti is phenomenal in the role, and it’s clearly not for lack of range, but rather a directorial choice to keep her emotions surface level.
Some bits seem more there to impress than express - the use of only six actors in eleven roles, for one, which the performers rise to the challenge but serves as a continuous distraction. Deeny, for instance, who is so impressive as the forbidding Earnshaw, is tasked with playing young child Linton by donning a toy store superhero costume and speaking in a grating toddler voice, seriously testing our suspension of disbelief with every scene he’s in. Yes, the impression got some laughs, but this was a stage of the plot nearing the emotional climax, in which the mood should have been infused with dread and sobriety. This was my main struggle with the second half of the show, which was no longer set in Nelly’s mind’s eye so took a more measured pace with clear-cut scenes. After the chaos of the first half, this felt plodding in comparison.
Having said all of the above, it’s an impressive spectacle, with some exhilarating moments and genuine laughs. It’s worth seeing perhaps for Bairstow’s Catherine alone. It may be that a viewer who is better acquainted with the book would not have needed the show to do the emotional heavy lifting I craved, and would therefore be far more entertained. You’ll have to see for yourself.