There’s an inherent, insistent strangeness to Wuthering Heights. Everything in Emily Brontë’s story of passionate, obsessive love is pushed beyond the edges of reason to jealousy, hatred and revenge. The Royal Exchange’s new version embraces this extremity, placing Cathy and Heathcliff on their own wild, abstract plane of reality.
The windy moors are a constant backdrop to Bryony Shanahan’s production, in which the heart of Rakhee Sharma’s impulsive Cathy belongs as much to the landscape as it does to Heathcliff (a captivatingly odd Alex Austin). In the first half, Cécile Trémolières’ bold, nature-evoking set is full of verdant growth, as grasses and heathers carpet the stage. After Cathy and Heathcliff are ripped apart, it becomes a wasteland, as bare as the gnarled tree whose branches reach overhead.
Andrew Sheridan’s adaptation focuses on the better-known first half of Brontë’s novel, with just a brief nod towards how Cathy and Heathcliff’s hurts and desires bleed into the next generation. His script is full of echoes and repetitions, as though the very language itself keeps being pulled back towards the vortex created by the two protagonists. But some of the famous poetry of Brontë’s dialogue feels overblown on stage; the most powerful moments are often when no words are spoken.
Between Zoe Spurr’s ethereal lighting, the eerie melodies of Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s music and the characters’ insistent talk of death, this feels at times almost like a ghost story. For better or worse, Wuthering Heights remains an odd, untameable tale in Sheridan and Shanahan’s telling, its soul temporarily set free to haunt the imagined heaths and hilltops of the Royal Exchange’s stage.
At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 7 March.
