Confusing adaptation leaves ‘Wuthering Heights’ lost in the moors

The wild heart of Emily Bronte’s 1847 gothic novel “Wuthering Heights” is the tempestuous love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the single-named Heathcliff, their relationship driven by passions as feral as nature itself. “Love story” is a bit of a misnomer. In Bronte’s ferocious novel, Cathy and Heathcliff’s star-crossed love becomes twisted into a bouquet of destruction that takes generations to heal. 

But Bronte sent far more than sexual tension crackling like lightning over the wind-whipped moors of northern England. When the dark-skinned orphan Heathcliff is adopted into Cathy’s white, landed family, the stage is also set for a story of class and racial conflict as deep and potentially deadly as rain-soaked boglands during a moonless storm. 

Little of that is apparent in the Wise Children theater company’s nearly three-hour staging of “Wuthering Heights” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.Adapted and directed by Wise Children artistic director Emma Rice, “Wuthering Heights” swings without structure or seeming intent between camp worthy of a ‘70s sitcom and attempts at straight-for-the-gut straight drama. Neither worksvery well. 

Between the two extremes, Rice’s adaptation muddles Bronte’s story to the point of incomprehensibility, despite the cast whimsically brandishing chalkboards and periodically providing direct-address tutorials on the tangled family trees of the dozen-or-so characters in the mostly double- and triple-cast (plus a few puppets) production. 

Bronte’s plot weaves a torrid tapestry of love, death, vengeance and the occasional haunting between two landed states in the wilds of northern England. The tale begins with young Cathy Earnshaw (understudy Katy Ellis filling in on opening nigh for Leah Brotherhood) and her brother Hindley (Tama Phethean), who live with their widowed father (Lloyd Gorman) at the rough, unkept estate Wuthering Heights. 

Heathcliff (Liam Tamne) arrives after Mr. Earnshaw finds the boy on a London street and decides to adopt him. Cathy instantly adores Heathcliff. Hindley hates him. 

Four miles off are the refined, well-to-do Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, including fussy Edgar Linton (Sam Archer) and his little sister Isabella (Georgia Bruce). 

The families are rich in symbolism: Nature, wildness, unleashed primal emotion and unchecked physicality rule at Wuthering Heights. Thrushcross Grange is all needle-point, table manners and buttoned vests. Bronte’s set-up allows for an epic battle between love and hate, civilization and nature, cruelty and compassion. 

Subtly is not part of Rice’s staging. Cathy and Heathcliff, for example, literally wear leaf crowns in the first act, hammering home their wild natures with all the nuance of a felled redwood. 

Nor are there any subtleties of character. To a one, Rice has her cast playing not human beings but cartoons, their characters as broad as a Yorkshire fen. The buffoonery alternates with jarring moments of brutal violence (bone-crunching fight choreo by Kev McCurdy), both elements combining to create disjointed aesthetic that doesn’t serve the story. 

As generations shift and patterns of childhood escapades and romance repeat, “Wuthering Heights” becomes nonsensical and dull. Cathy and Heathcliff as are vile and cruel as Heathcliff’s varied tormentors, rendering one of the world’s great love stories profoundly unpleasant. 

By the third or so time the chalk boards come out and the cast again explains how various the Lintons and Earnshaws are cousins/in-laws/betrothed/widowed/otherwise entangled, it’s tough to care. 

Vicki Mortimer’s minimalist set design is dominated by a large backdrop where projections of whirling clouds and driving rain frame the cast, and wooden chairs, built into tree-sized, ladder-like contraptions that the cast wheels about and clambers over throughout. Mortimer’s costume design is perplexing. There are elaborate period details (Edgar Linton’s fussy dress coat) on some garments, and things that make no sense (the town doctor pairs tails with kelly-green dish gloves, evoking Jimmy the Cricket) on others. Cathy’s garments go from 19th century tomboy to ‘80s prom queen.

There is music throughout, composed by Ian Ross and predominantly deployed as a five-piece onstage band accompanies a Greek chorus of singing, dancing “moors.” Cathy gets a growling rock solo. The lyrics, as throughout, were primarily unintelligible, although Ellis delivers Cathy’s repeated refrain of “I am the earth” with increasing Billy Idolesque ferocity. 

The music could be an asset, but the vocals opening night were not. Consistently muddied lyrics and dubious pitch issues might have been technical: The show was halted mid-scene roughly 45 minutes in, for reasons that were never explained. Then again, there was no notable improvement when things restarted. 

Chicago Shakespeare brought “Wuthering Heights” here from England, in a much-heralded co-production with the aforementioned Wise Children, National Theatre, Bristol Old Vic and York Theatre Royal in association with Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

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