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May 14, 2023

Review: In This ‘Wuthering Heights,’ Music, Moors and Untamed Spirits

Advertisement Supported by Critic’s Pick Emma Rice’s glorious stage adaptation

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Critic's Pick

Emma Rice's glorious stage adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel is a feat of storytelling, with a singing and dancing chorus embodying the moors.

By Laura Collins-Hughes

With a whip in one hand and a wind-bent tree in the other, the barefoot girl makes a taunting entrance, radiating caprice like some malicious sprite. This is Catherine Earnshaw, wild thing of Wuthering Heights, and if she is faintly ridiculous in her menace, it is menace nonetheless.

Landing a first impression that distills the essence of a character is a rare art, and one of many things that the quick-witted, nimble-bodied company of Wise Children's wondrous "Wuthering Heights" does exceptionally well. Adapted by the British director Emma Rice from Emily Brontë's 19th-century novel, this music-filled version is an embrace, an envelopment: a feat of storytelling that wraps itself around the audience, pulling us into its silliness and sorrow.

As besotted with the gale-tossed Yorkshire moors as Catherine and her tormented Heathcliff ever were, it makes that landscape a playground of the imagination, pausing every so often to ensure — in a friendly, tongue-in-cheek fashion — that we’re following along. Because as a baffled stranger says, when he bumbles into this multi-household, multigenerational saga, "Everyone's related, all the names sound the same."

Well, yes, but this is a show so devoted to clarity that it helps us keep track of each fresh death (and goodness, these people die at an alarming rate) by chalking that character's name on a blackboard the size of a small tombstone and walking it slowly across the stage. That's also our clue that the next time we see the actor whose character has died, that cast member will most likely be playing someone else — possibly the dead person's child.

Also, the moors in this production at St. Ann's Warehouse, performed last winter at the National Theater in London, are not just the locale, which Vicki Mortimer's rough wooden set suggests mainly with the low gray clouds moving past on an upstage screen. (Video design is by Simon Baker.) The moors are embodied, too, by a chorus that sings, dances and possesses opinions — particularly the Leader of the Yorkshire Moors (a wonderful Nandi Bhebhe), who wears a headdress of brambly magnificence and takes on some of the vital background-providing function that the old family retainer Ellen has in the novel.

Anyway, no need to brush up on your Brontë. You’ll be fine.

At the heart of it all are Catherine and Heathcliff, two halves of the same soul who are just scamps when her father finds little Heathcliff parentless on the Liverpool docks and brings him home to join the family at Wuthering Heights. Catherine's older brother, Hindley, takes an instant loathing to the newcomer and treats him viciously, feeling his birthright threatened by the presence of this boy whose skin is darker than his.

"Gypsy," Hindley calls Heathcliff, and pummels him whenever he gets the chance.

For Catherine, Heathcliff is a best friend and partner in mischief. Their youngest selves are played initially by puppets, then seamlessly succeeded by the adult actors Lucy McCormick and Liam Tamne, who bring a roiling chemistry to what will become Catherine and Heathcliff's desperate mutual obsession. But as they gambol about the moors in those early years, it's the joy they take in each other, and the freedom they feel together, that forms a bond so unbreakable it transcends death.

Like the other inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate Thrushcross Grange — home of the laughably effete Linton siblings, Edgar (Sam Archer) and Isabella (Katy Owen, the show's brilliant comic powerhouse) — Catherine and Heathcliff are formed and deformed by their environment, a place where it's easy to be solitary, to nurse a grudge, to wreak revenge.

As beastly as Catherine generally is, and as enormous as her eventual betrayal of Heathcliff is, it's the men who, beginning as boys, do great violence to one another, both physical and psychic, and spend their lives perpetuating it. Heathcliff, of course, is the prime example, growing from an ingenuous child into a glowering adult who spins all the considerable evil ever done to him — much of it based on race and class — into justification for his long game of retribution.

Yet Rice — a longtime St. Ann's favorite for productions including "Brief Encounter" and "Tristan & Yseult" — makes certain that this beguiling "Wuthering Heights" is no carnival of gloom. Owen, especially, is a font of mirth, not only as Isabella but also as her extravagantly spoiled son, Little Linton, a creature so enfeebled by his cosseted upbringing that he's practically boneless. Frances (Eleanor Sutton), the fragile nitwit who has the poor taste to marry Catherine's brother, Hindley (Tama Phethean), is also a delicious source of comedy — as are assorted bitey dogs: puppets made of skulls on scythes.

Hindley has kindness solely for Frances, and when she dies he crumbles squalidly. Yet as cruel and falling-down drunk as Phethean is as Hindley, he is equally gentle — which is not to say saintly — as Hindley's son, Hareton, who has been beaten down by both his father and Heathcliff, but chooses not to emulate them by targeting victims of his own. It is a gorgeous performance, its agility and tenderness of a piece with this production's.

Stalked by Catherine's perambulating ghost, and infused with live music by Ian Ross that feels somehow like earth and air, this is a show with a gloriously untamed spirit. On this first stop on its American tour, it is better — deeper and sexier — than the excellent version I saw in London early this year.

At nearly three hours, including the intermission, it asks an investment of time that's absolutely worth it. I, for one, want to go again.

Wuthering HeightsThrough Nov. 6 at St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.

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