STORYTELLERS theatre company have evolved their own technique for dramatising famous books, and have had several successes with it. Their version of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, adapted and directed by Mary Elizabeth Burke Kennedy, is less successful, and the reasons seem clear. The usual mixture of narration and dialogue is used, but with the balance heavily weighted towards the former to an extent that dilutes illusion.

A sense of artificiality soon becomes pervasive as each actor in turn addresses the audience, or the air, explaining the situation at that point. Seven actors take all of the roles, which adds confusion to scene after scene especially as the ageing process is not well conveyed. Towards the end, when a new generation has arrived, portrayed by the recent dear departed without physical or notable psychological change, coherence is very shaky indeed.

The thread is drawn through all the main incidents of the novel. Heathcliffe (Andrew Josph) arrives at Wuthering Heights as a boy, to fall in love with Cathy (Corinne Martin) and be bullied by Hindley (Eugene O'Brien). Cathy marries her neighbour Edgar Lint on, Heathcliffe goes awol and returns bent on acquisition and revenge. It ends in death and frustration, but with hope for the children of the mismatched unions.

At the heart of the novel is the extraordinary passion, shared by Heathcliffe and Cathy, a flame that burns beyond the grave. It is the nature of this production that the fire is banked down, smouldering beneath the unreal words uttered by the two, either as narration or as declamatory dialogue. Their characters do not have room to grow. Best served by the treatment generally are Bairbre Ni Chaoimh's housekeeper, who retains her identity throughout, Eugene O'Brien's Hindley and Natalie Stringer's Isabella.

The production should prove a useful illustration of the book to the students at whom it seems to be aimed.