Theatre reviews: Wuthering Heights | Not Now
Wuthering Heights, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh ****
Not Now, Oran Mor, Glasgow ****
Despite their status as pillars of 19th century literary culture, the radicalism of the Bronte sisters never fails to astonish. Charlotte is bold enough, with her blazing defence of Jane Eyre’s equal humanity against the patriarchal power and patronising attitudes of Rochester before his fall. And in Wuthering Heights, Emily goes further, exposing not only what we would now call the toxic masculinity embraced by Heathcliff and his bullying adoptive brother Hindley Earnshaw, but also the unspoken politics of race and empire that is now recognised as part of Emily Bronte’s world – with Heathcliff, the dark-skinned “other”, allegedly found on Liverpool docks by old Mr Earnshaw – and the politics of the earth itself, in the form of the wild Yorkshire moors that are adored by Heathcliff and Earnshaw’s daughter Cathy, and that themselves embody resistance to a fast-encroaching industrial and commercial revolution that will change the face of the earth.
In Emma Rice’s thrilling and sometimes startling stage version of Wuthering Heights – substantially rewritten, yet always faithful to the spirit of the original, with Rice’s powerful lyrics driving the action to music by composer Ian Ross – The Moor becomes a character in her own right, replacing the novel’s servant-narrator Nellie, and leading the chorus-like cast in a wild and irresistible backbeat to the narrative, ranging from fierce dance sequences to the wails and howls of the windswept moor at its most brutal.
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Hide AdNandi Bhebhe is magnificent as the Moor, Liam Tamne and Lucy McCormick epic and unforgettable as Heathcliff and Cathy, bound together by a compulsion that seems more cruel than loving, given the brutality of the world that shapes them. And if Rice’s occasional resort to comedy and send-up sometimes jars a little – notably in the scenes involving the over-civilised Lintons, and other assorted metropolitan toffs – the huge power of her theatrical storytelling soon sweeps us onward again, in a production that Rice conceived as a Greek-style tragedy about what might happen if, as individuals and as a society, we allow cruelty to take hold; and which she fully succeeds in endowing with all of that status, and power.
The Scottish-based Northern Irish playwright David Ireland is also known for the wildness of his imagination, and for his embrace of extreme situations that lend themselves to the bloodiest black comedy; but his latest short lunchtime piece for A Play, A Pie And A Pint finds that wildness reined in and magnificently well used, to provide the simmering power behind this brief dialogue for two characters. Not Now is set in a Belfast kitchen, where young Matthew is reeling from the recent death of his father, and feeling hesitant about leaving his mother to go to London for a long-awaited audition at RADA, even as he practises his chosen Shakespeare speech, the “winter of discontent” soliloquy from Richard III.
His bachelor uncle Ray appears, ready to drive him to the airport; and over the next 50 minutes, the two fall into a perfectly-observed and sometimes hilarious exchange of views that ranges from Ray’s opinion on how Matthew should tackle the speech, through brief but telling thoughts on culture, national identity and voice, to profound matters of war and peace, explored both in the soliloquy, and in a moment of tense revelation about Matthew’s father’s past during the Troubles. In Becky Hope Palmer’s production, Martin Quinn and Harry Ward deliver two flawless performances; in a play that finally offers a brief but searing glimpse of the power of theatre itself, at its best, to leap all our self-imposed barriers of identity and culture, and to speak to the continuing trauma of a troubled Belfast neighbourhood, in the language of an English playwright who died more than 400 years ago.
Both shows run until 28 May