Glossy role for the bog in unprecedentedly perfect update of Wuthering Heights at Holland Festival

I can't resist mentioning it, because I think they were doing it for a reason, the dancers in the musical Wuthering Heights making really visible big rounds with their arms one time: this was a half-second reference to Kate Bush's world-changing 'mill wings' in the music video to her legendary 1978 pop song. A subtle wink as, in my eyes, only Brits can do, because all their fun and grotesque funniness in no way detracts from the bitter seriousness of the story they are telling.

Like this. Those first two sentences stand, and they are longer than my SEO plug-in allows. Probably influenced by the richness of language in the performance of Wuthering Heights, now on show in a rather unique collaboration between the largesse of Delamar and the artistic ambition of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

Jealousy, revenge and unhappiness

Wuthering Heights, which many Dutch people will only know from Kate Bush, is the book that counts as one of the primal examples of the Gothic Romance that took such a great flight across the North Sea, in the 19th century. Emily Brontë's best complex novel is about the passionate and rather destructive love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. Their love leads to jealousy, revenge and unhappiness. All this against a backdrop of the wild high moors ('Moors') of Yorkshire, where everyone has the same surname or first name, but in different combinations. And it is always stormy or foggy.

The musical, developed by director and writer Emma Rice, follows the story of the book, but does not emphasise the romantic love between Cathy and Heathcliff. Right from the first minute, the ensemble makes it clear that we are not going to swoon at sighing souls on the moors for three hours (including intermission). Indeed, very early in the performance, it becomes clear that that heath is not the backdrop, but the lead role in this theatrical work.

Exclusion and class difference

And what a lead role: singer and dancer Kandaka Moore is the one who, like a chorus leader in a classical tragedy, leads the players and the audience through the story, and that story is thus about how exclusion and class difference are at the true heart of Brontë's gothic novel.

And now, before anyone starts whining again (there's usually little need for that) about how now Wuthering Heights has also suffered a woke abuse: it's just all in the story, it's only by adding a few touches and doing something with the tone that you suddenly see it. That makes the show a comedy rather than a smartlap, but British in a way that only the British can. That alone is reason enough to go and see it.

Merciless perfection

Whereas the Germans have the 'alienation effect' invented by Brecht and the Dutch make do with cabaret-like satire, the British have had the weapon of irony for as long as they have been on that island. And irony, that is, can be slapstick, that can be bold winking: self-mockery, but always executed in bloody seriousness and with merciless perfection.

Perfect is everything about this performance: the ensemble playing, the timing of the jokes, the seriousness of the emotions, the singing, the dancing, the band that can really handle all genres with a minimum of instruments, and, last but not least, the crystal-clear diction. Every word is intelligible; the actors are not ashamed to let that intelligibility rise above everything else. As a result, it may sometimes seem like over-explained children's theatre, but it is just immensely helpful for the not-so-experienced viewer.

The child in the spectator

That clarity, that open-mindedness and courage to deal simply with very complex things is what this Wuthering Heights has in common with the opening performance of this festival: 'Drive Your Plough...' by Complicité, previously discussed on this site. There, too, was a form of puppetry and other elements that you don't see much in serious theatre for big people, all in the service of clarity, and as a helping hand to the child in us, which we can give all the freedom in theatre again.

And then that leading role for the moors, or 'The Moors', as it is called in English. In the programme booklet, the director tells how, as an adult, she reread the romance from her childhood and saw that it was not about impossible love, but about cruelty and revenge. And that cruelty and revenge is in never really welcoming the outcast Heathcliff, even on the high moors of Yorkshire.

Not entirely unexpectedly, this made me think of our heathland, on the moors around Ter Apel.