Lead an impressionable adolescent girl to Wuthering Heights and her romantic expectations will be warped for life.
In tackling Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, however, director Emma Rice has no intention of resurrecting your great-great-great-etcetera-grandmother’s version. The classic plot points may remain – even the increasingly grim later chapters that director William Wyler smartly decided to omit from his 1939 film classic. Rice has zhuzhed the basic elements up (as she did Brief Encounters and The Red Shoes) with her signature playfulness and panache.
For this spritely but thorough reenactment, Rice employs a dozen chameleonic, superbly skilled British actors to cover some 22 roles. Act 1 covers the familiar tragic tale of a thwarted young love; Act 2, the residual damage passed down the increasingly convoluted (not to mention consanguineous) family tree. You’ll need to keep careful track of the genealogy: even the peripheral characters confess to occasional confusion.
The story starts with a lineup of slates noting respective dates of demise. Witness to the tangled history is Nandi Bhebhe as “the leader of the Yorkshire Moors.” Sporting a crown of gorse, she embodies the spirit of this forlorn landscape, where despite the social isolation – or perhaps because of it — intrafamilial grudges easily escalate into deadly feuds.
Playing spirited Catherine Earnshaw, the focal point, Lucy McCormick is a far cry from Merle Oberon of the soulful eyes. McCormick’s Catherine is a hoyden, a hobgoblin, her mouth set in a permanent rictus of mischief and malevolence. How Heathcliff (Liam Tamme) falls for and remains enamored of her grotesquerie becomes a mystery as intriguing as his provenance. But perhaps Rice is underscoring a theme: the notion that the pair are indeed twinned souls.
Heathcliff arrives, unannounced, on the moors as a ragamuffin orphan (initially a charming knee-length puppet designed by John Leader). Kindly Mr. Earnshaw, Sr. (nicely portrayed by Lloyd Gorman) has taken the lad under his wing, to the abiding resentment of his legitimate heir, loutish Hindley Earnshaw (strapping Tama Phethean).
As children, Cathy and Heathcliff get to run wild and free together, but upon reaching marriageable age she opts for bourgeois stability in the form of neighboring toff Edgar Linton (Sam Archer). Three years later, Edgar’s impressionable younger sister, Isabella (petite, piquant Katy Owen), takes up with the shunned castoff – Heathcliff having resurfaced as a man of apparent means. And meanness, as it turns out.
Like Dickens, her forerunner, Brontë was skilled in mapping out how brutal treatment can turn a victim into a bully. When, in the second act, the script digs into the evil tactics with which Heathcliff exacts revenge for his lost love, I felt the vestigial romantic teenager within me rebel a bit. In my youth, I somehow managed to rewrite the script such that the tragically forlorn Heathcliff retained his essential goodness and undying devotion. It’s a much darker scenario laid out here.
After expiring spectacularly with a searing hard-rock lament (composer Ian Ross provides a full spectrum of emotive musical numbers), Cathy returns as a Beetlejuice-eyed ghoul observing the aftermath. Owen, previously a delight as the ornately bewigged, balletically inclined Isabella, is re-assigned to portray Isabella’s sickly, whiny son “Little Linton,” for whom absentee father Heathcliff has great plans. Caught up in a mania for dynastic domination, Heathcliff is determined to marry the lad off to Cathy’s own, slightly older child, Catherine Linton (Eleanor Sutton). Confusing, right? And just not all that much fun, despite a determinedly cheery, tied-with-a-bow denouement.
Hallmark ending notwithstanding, you won’t regret the journey, or the three hours spent in the company of this energetic ensemble. Before he sours, Heathcliff comes across as dreamy, in the teenage-jargon sense. Tamne is a very fine singer, and Ross gives him a fitting cri de coeur. Heathcliff’s story may not end well, but as long as the spell lasts, this mournful soul is romance incarnate.
And on second thought, don’t work too hard keeping track of who’s related to or obsessed with whom. Just enjoy this rollicking tale, as the performers clearly do.
Wuthering Heights opened October 18, 2022, at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through November 6. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
