Wuthering Heights on stage: an ‘emotionally epic’ adaptation
Emma Rice’s touring production is packed with her ‘trademark troubadour quirkiness’

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights – that tale of “turbulent passions and terrible cruelties” set high on the Yorkshire moors – is “commonly read in adolescence, when one’s sensibilities may be particularly susceptible to its intoxicating highs and lows”, said Donald Hutera in The Times.
Theatre director Emma Rice fell for the book as a teenager – and her lifelong passion for it is clear in every scene of this “emotionally epic” adaptation. Lasting nearly three hours, the play (which is due to arrive at the National Theatre in February as part of its long tour) is a real “corker”: inventive, absorbing and brilliantly acted.
Rice’s staging is packed with her “trademark troubadour quirkiness”, said Quentin Letts in The Sunday Times. There are dances, puppets, songs, “ceaseless movement, bohemian feyness”, and a “seemingly mad jumble of props” that actually help clarify the tangled plot.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
In one bold move, Rice has replaced the housekeeper-narrator figure with a kind of “all-singing, all-dancing” Greek chorus embodying the windswept moor, said Georgina Brown in the Daily Mail. Led by Nandi Bhebhe, it howls up hurricanes and helps the audience keep track of the convoluted storylines. It’s a daring concept, thrillingly done – and typical of this “wildly imaginative, exhilarating piece of theatre”.
The cast is strong, with many kept busy in multiple roles, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. Lucy McCormick’s “pleasingly yobbish, untameable” Cathy is like a “more unhinged Hedda Gabler”. Ash Hunter makes the “diabolical” Heathcliff “sympathetic” without remotely glamorising him. And Katy
Owen is a “comic force” in roles including Cathy’s love rival Isabella, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Ultimately, I found all the “audacious theatricality” and kookiness to be both “ingenious and faintly ridiculous”, like a “postmodern literary satire” that risks having no real depth. Yet the show does “build its world, albeit a conspicuously artificial one, and hold us in it with an intensity of its own”. It is funny, charming – and “exquisitely” done.
Bristol Old Vic, and touring until May 2022 (wisechildrendigital.com)
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
5 costly cartoons about the national debt
Cartoons Political cartoonists take on the USA's financial hole, rare bipartisan agreement, and Donald Trump and Mike Johnson.
-
Green goddess salad recipe
The Week Recommends Avocado can be the creamy star of the show in this fresh, sharp salad
-
The Biden cover-up: a 'near-treasonous' conspiracy
Talking Point Using 'Trumpian' tactics, the former president's inner circle maintained a conspiracy of silence around his cognitive and physical decline
-
Green goddess salad recipe
The Week Recommends Avocado can be the creamy star of the show in this fresh, sharp salad
-
Ancient India: living traditions – 'ethereal and sensual' exhibition
The Week Recommends Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism are explored in show that remains 'remarkably compact'
-
6 well-preserved homes built in the 1930s
Feature Featuring a restored 1934 colonial in Arizona and a cold-storage warehouse turned loft in New York City
-
Things in Nature Merely Grow: memoir of 'harsh beauty' after loss
The Week Recommends Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li's 'devastating' memoir explores the deaths of her two sons
-
Sirens: entertaining satire on the lives of the ultra-wealthy stars Julianne Moore
The Week Recommends This 'blackly comic affair' unfurls at a 'breakneck speed'
-
Mrs Warren's Profession: 'tour-de-force' from Imelda Staunton and daughter Bessie Carter
The Week Recommends Mother-daughter duo bring new life to George Bernard Shaw's morality play
-
Critics' choice: Steak houses that break from tradition
Feature Eight hours of slow-roasting prime rib, a 41-ounce steak, and a former Catholic school chapel turned steakhouse
-
Tash Aw's 6 favorite books about forbidden love
Feature The Malaysian novelist recommends works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and more