When Emily Brontë’s Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, was first published in 1848, it was savaged by critics across the country. One reviewer wrote: ‘the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love—even over demons in the human form.’
Although many were alarmed by its electrifying and astonishing content, even the bleakest reviews recognised the author’s supreme literary talent, and the novel is now considered a classic. The turmoil and tragedy that once stunned Victorian readers is what continues to draw in new enthusiasts every year – including director Emma Rice, whose much anticipated adaptation of Wuthering Heights will be performing at York Theatre Royal this November.
Writing on her love for the classic Brontë story, Emma Rice reminisces; “I loved its drama and its intrigue but most I loved a story that spanned not only generations but life and death. I didn’t have a literal ghost knocking at my window, but I was haunted by memories that knocked at my soul. In my teenage mind, I was Heathcliff. I was misunderstood, angry and grieving – I wanted people to feel, see and understand my pain. Emily Brontë saw me. She felt death everywhere and understood loss as sharply as I felt my own.”
Recalling a childhood trip to the Yorkshire landmarks that inspired the novel, Emma Rice remembers them as “remote, bleak, and somehow devastating”.
The spectacular Yorkshire landscape is evoked so strongly in Wuthering Heights that the gloomy, sombre moors become as much a character as Heathcliff and Cathy. It is a breathtaking and wild part of rural England that Charlotte Brontë remembered as a “remote and unclaimed region”. After the death of her younger sister, Emily, Charlotte wrote that, in Wuthering Heights, she had mastered the stories of the dwellers therein, “she knew them, knew their ways, their language, and their family histories; she could hear of them with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate.” As young girls, Charlotte and Emily had been removed from school following a devastating typhoid outbreak that killed two of their sisters, and the moors became their playground, their neighbours their only friends. Emily was said to walk the same ten miles every single day.
The Pennine village where the Bronte sisters grew up was polluted, and unhygienic. Although perched on the edge of open country, high up on the edge of Haworth Moor, the death rate was as high as those in London or Bradford, with 41 per cent of children failing even to reach their sixth birthday. The average age of death was just 24. Emily Brontë’s intimate dedication to these bleak landscapes of her childhood shines through in the descriptions of Wuthering Heights, where the moors can be as cruel and unforgiving as the novel’s Byronic anti-hero, Heathcliff. In one chapter, she writes “one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.”
The strong character of these locations compelled director Emma Rice to bring them centre stage in her adaptation of the famous novel. Scrapping the narration of Nelly Dean, the tragedy is instead told by a chorus of the moors who bear witness to the terrible tales of love, and death there. Emma writes “It is The Moor that tells the story of Wuthering Heights in my production. Singing and dancing as one, they warn us that: “A scatter of yellow stars might seem to welcome hope, but the adder slides beneath.” This production is epic, the characters superhuman; Catherine, Heathcliff and Hareton the Gods of Chaos, Revenge and Hope.”
The strong sense of place in the novel has made Yorkshire a place of pilgrimage for literary enthusiasts across the world, and historical remnants of the Brontë sisters’ lives, and their writing, can be found all over the county. The moorland that Emily Brontë describes is thought to be the land around Haworth where she spent most of her life. Youngest sister, Anne Brontë, spent several years close to York working as a governess, and was especially inspired by the Gothic architecture of the Minster. She was so taken by her time in York that, on her deathbed, she asked Charlotte to take her back one last time before she died of tuberculosis. Anne’s final resting place would not be in Haworth, but by the coast in nearby Scarborough.
It makes sense, then, that Wuthering Heights would eventually come home to Yorkshire, and a new theatrical adaptation is the perfect occasion. Shot through with music and dance, Emma Rice (Bagdad Cafe, Wise Children, Brief Encounter) transforms Emily Brontë’s masterpiece into a passionate, powerful experience of love, revenge, and redemption. Reviews have called it “theatrical magic”, “intensely absorbing” and “wildly imaginative”, and Rice’s unique vision promises to take this classic story to new heights – a fitting tribute to the novel which once shocked and horrified Victorian readers.
The appeal of stories like Emily Brontë’s never fades.“Rich with our own humanity” Emma writes, “it holds our own stories, our losses, hopes, fears and dreams.” But will Heathcliff and Cathy find peace back here in Yorkshire? Perhaps the answer lies in the closing lines of the novel, as the narrator looks out over the moors onto their final resting places; “I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
Wuthering Heights is an adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel by the National Theatre, Wise Children, Bristol Old Vic and York Theatre Royal. Directed by Emma Rice, it will be playing at York Theatre Royal from 9-20 November 2021. Book tickets here or call York Theatre Royal Box Office on 01904 623568
By Kitty Wenham
