Even more so than Elerian, Emma Rice is a prominent director adapter who doesn’t take familiar lyrics at first glance. Rice, former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, made his name with the tour company Kneehigh, which deconstructed time-honored titles like ‘Brief Encounter’ and ‘Tristan & Yseult’. Since then, Rice has started a theatrical entity called Wise Children, whose irreverent take on the Emily Brontë novel “Wuthering Heights” can be found on the National Theater’s Lyttelton stage until March 19.
The eclectic impulses behind this production are evident in the cast, who bring together dancers, performance artists and a “Hamilton” alum to tell the corpse-strewn tale of the foundling Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, the veteran of the aforementioned musical) and the evil Catherine ( Lucy McCormick, an outcast talent who moves between self-invented work and plays like this one). The charismatic Sam Archer combines several roles with the charismatic Sam Archer, an actor-dancer whose nimble move Rice’s take on this 1847 novel quite explicitly keeps it from being earthbound: it’s always handy to have an artist on hand who can perform at any given moment. moment can rise.
Rice’s freewheeling approach to the material doesn’t suit the purists. It is surprising to see that the Yorkshire moors – a setting crucial to the novel – have been brought to three-dimensional life by an assemblage led by the arresting Nandi Bhebhe, who appears to wear a crown of sticks and twigs and a retinue has plants of similarly dressed people. Elsewhere, the twists and turns of the plot are confronted head on. “How is anyone expected to follow this?” asks the resident narrator, Lockwood (one of Archer’s various roles), only for Bhebhe to chime in with the realization that “nobody said this will be easy.”
Rice’s goal is to ease a path through a labyrinthine novel by bringing her total theater aesthetic into a music-heavy production that heralds the fate of the characters on a blackboard, a choice that ties directly into the association many will have with this novel from their student days. A few trimming wouldn’t hurt, and there are times when the reinvention seems reckless, un-revealing.
But I won’t soon forget a fierce-eyed McCormick who haunts the action from beyond the grave like a constant foreboding of doom, and Katy Owen’s gleeful Isabella Linton almost steals the show: a figure of crowd-pleasing fun amid the landscape of mortality that we see. , as with ‘The Chairs’, come to realize that this is our shared destiny.
The chairs† Directed by Omar Elerian. Almeida Theater, until March 5.
Wuthering Heights† Directed by: Emma Rice. National Theatre, until March 19.
