Wuthering Heights at Rose Theatre

Rose Thetre, Kingston is doing great modern versions of classic stories, I am thinking of things like The Importance of Being Earnest and Lord of the Flies, so it was a very easy decision to go and see Wuthering Heights. The poster above was enough to convince me that it would be interesting so I dutifully paid my £25 (very reasonable!) for seat J39 in the stalls.

As always, I walked there allowing myself enough time to grab a beer before going in to the auditorium.

I has heard several versions of the story on the radio over the years but had managed to forget almost all of it so I could approach it afresh (again). The story had lots of births, marriages and deaths and I very much appreciated the family tree drawn at the back of the stage where these were recorded as they happened, very useful when trying to work out who were cousins and who were siblings etc.

The large set of characters and the long timescale of the story were skilfully met by having actors play several different roles, e.g. a mother would die and the actor reappear sometime later as her sister's daughter, or something like that. It worked well.

One actor caught my eye slightly more than the others (this was very much an ensemble production) and that was Nicole Sawyerr who played Isabella, Frances and young Cathy. She shone on the night but I may also have been recalling seeing her in something at Theatre 503 where she has performed a few time.

The language of the production was modern and so was the staging but the story was still very much Wuthering Heights. Instead of being a period piece it was a bright and fresh production and that made it more relatable without losing any of the drama.

Wuthering Heights was a great success.