Wuthering Heightshas never felt so contemporary. Peter Crawleylooks at how a new stage version transfers the story to the modern-day London art scene, and tells it through the second-generation characters, tabloid spreads and Wikipedia entries.
WHAT on earth is "extreme storytelling"? This is the phrase used to describe The Heights, a new stage adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (a story which was extreme enough to begin with).
In the hands of the restlessly imaginative theatre company Playgroup, though, the 19th-century story of destructive passion and bitter revenge on the bleak Yorkshire moors has been updated, relocated and reshaped to include almost every reference to Brontë's novel in contemporary culture - from 1930s movie adaptations to 1980s power ballads.
"Extreme storytelling is something we made up," admits Tom Creed, director of the show and (with Hilary O'Shaughnessy) joint artistic director of the Cork-based company. "Part of the project with The Heightsis to look at storytelling and to look at the theatre and see how it works now: how you tell a story using whatever you have to hand. We've created a world where it can make sense as part of the act of storytelling to include singing 1980s cover versions and doing aerobics or acting out melodrama and all sorts of other things we've thrown at it."
That may sound wilfully idiosyncratic, but such an approach may ultimately prove archly faithful to a novel described by Charlotte Brontë as "hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials". It's a good description, too, for the work of Playgroup - if YouTube footage of Kate Bush dancing in the wily, windy moors still counts as homely material.
Pursuing what Creed calls a "DIY aesthetic", the company has been staging disarmingly inventive shows since 2002, including a 10-episode soap opera in the back room of a pub (Soap!), a performance on a scheduled passenger train (The Train Show) and a beautifully moving one-woman performance in Lynda Radley's The Art of Swimming.
Indeed, it was Radley who kick-started the idea for a Wuthering Heights adaptation during rehearsals for a previous event, Dark Week, in 2005. In a sequence designed to provoke reactions from a group of actors she would sensationally recount the plots of various films, Halloween and Dirty Dancing among them, but wrung more fun from the melodramatic 1939 movie version of Wuthering Heights.
Given the radical reworking, it may seem odd to hear her say that they went by the book. "It's actually quite faithful," Creed says of their 90-minute version. "The decisions that we've made structurally have all come from a very close reading of the novel."
Their interpretation, however, is certainly extreme, transposing events from the moors to a contemporary city, where the story of Cathy and Heathcliff has now become world famous, and is told and retold through rumours, tabloid spreads, television interviews and Wikipedia entries. In Playgroup's version the second generation characters, generally ignored by film adaptations, have taken on the mantle of the tale, piecing together the lives and times of their parents in the lurid excesses of 1980s art scene.
"Some people have found that to be the most difficult jump," Lynda Radley says of the story's relocation. "For me the most important thing in the Cathy and Heathcliff story is the effect that the environment has on them, and the isolation that they manage to create within it, whether that environment is in the country or the city. The idea of lonely souls wandering through the city, of people being totally alone despite being in a crowd, of two young people who can see nobody but each other still translates quite well."
"And also, do you make a nod to the fact that everyone knows the story?" wonders Creed. "Or that at least everyone has an idea of the story."
Some people, they discovered, know the story only through Kate Bush's piercing ballad of 1978, itself inspired by the 1970 film version, not the book. "We're still working out the approach to Kate Bush," Creed admits. "She's kind of the elephant in the room."
"We have to find some way to acknowledge her," says Radley, who keeps track of the original material and every embellishment in her role as dramaturg. At one stage she dutifully studied Bush's original video in order to teach the actors its twirling, high kicking choreography. "Not very successfully," she adds. "That probably won't make an appearance. But the ghost will make her presence felt some way."
So many ghosts have attached themselves to Wuthering Heights that the story comes laden down with cultural baggage: together with Laurence Olivier's Heathcliff, Ralph Fiennes' Heathcliff and Timothy Dalton's Heathcliff, there have been about 14 film incarnations since 1920, a clutch of operas and numerous stage adaptations.
"It is sometimes overwhelming when you're trying to acknowledge all that and yet create something new, that is our own," says Radley. So it is that Playgroup's The Heightsstages classic material as though it's a contemporary work, conceiving of Cathy as a model and artistic muse, whose relationships with gallery owner Edgar Linton and her adopted brother Heathcliff are the stuff of intense media speculation, while one of the novel's original narrators, the housekeeper Nelly Dean, is now a music journalist and author of a controversial exposé.
"We're having a go at all the iconic scenes," says Creed. "And some of them are being reshaped as [ Cathy and Heathcliff] booking into a hotel for two weeks, or talkshow interviews, conversations with your hairdresser, or songs: some scenes we're rendering as 1980s cover versions."
Given the arty milieu and media set of the 1980s, together with the various love affairs, adoptions and rising generations of the original plot, it's tempting to see the company making allusions to real, recognisable figures, such as the life of Paula Yates as told by Peaches Geldof, for instance.
Is this new Cathy anyone we know? "That's certainly the world we're thinking about," says Creed, "but we're not doing a piece where Heathcliff is Michael Hutchence and Bob Geldof is Edgar Linton."
He returns to his main theme: how to tell stories in a way that most makes sense now. As a young director with a voracious appetite for the theatre, he recognises a hunger for work which is "interesting, different and now". Nominated for an Irish Times Theatre Award for his similarly stylistically eclectic take on Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, for Rough Magic, he knows what he's talking about.
"People can't expect that by churning out the same old thing, you're going to get a new audience to see it," he says. "Our instinct is to tell a story now in a way that is surprising, exciting and moving and maybe a bit political. Let's do Wuthering Heights and let's try and find a way of making it work now. We have to try and make it as simple as possible, while throwing the kitchen sink at it."
The Heightsruns from January 31st until February 16th in Project Arts Centre. The Art of Swimmingruns in Bewley's Café Theatre from February 19th until March 1st.
