Wuthering Heights, National Theatre, review: Bront? turned into a frolicsome, larky romp

A dedicated purveyor of passion on stage, over the years the director Emma Rice has served up love illicit (Tristan and Yseult), love furtive (Brief Encounter) and love demented (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), to name three hits.

Now, in a production first seen at the Bristol Old Vic last autumn, she gives us love thwarted – the wild, unconsummated devotion between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff which Emily Bront? bequeathed the world in 1847, a year before her death.

Given how popular Bronte’s bleak classic remains you’d think that theatres would be inundated with star names incarnating the ardent pair, who are brought together by fate (he’s a foundling, taken in by Earnshaw senior, and treated as a favoured son) yet divided by wrong-headed, status-conscious matches. This century, though, apart from a few regional outings and a Bollywood version, the book has surprisingly stayed on the shelf.

I can’t say that either Lucy McCormick as the tormented woman of the Yorkshire moors or Ash Hunter as Cathy’s brutalised kindred spirit leave a lasting impression, albeit the former makes a magnificently arresting entrance, cracking a whip and screaming.

McCormick enacts the famous early vignette of ghostly gothic fright, knocking at a window and pleading to be let in, with due mad-eyed excess. The only issue is that an unsympathetic spirit of bedlam then haunts her every look. Our heroine’s turbulence is further embellished with a shouty, sweary rock number. Eat your heart out Kate Bush.

For his part, Hunter offers us a Heathcliff solid and scowling, but mainly impassive; the fact that the actor is mixed-race allows an interpretation, lurking in the book, of racial alienation. I wanted less Darcy-like restraint and more Oli Reed darkness. Rice implies rather than shows his sexual nastiness through a jittery soliloquy by his wretched wife Isabella – played by Rice regular and panache-loaded Katy Owen.

Elsewhere, is she honouring or travestying the work she says she loves to the hilt? The atmosphere is more gooey than gritty, more com than rom. Folksy strumming banishes aching silence and moaning winds, while a larky, spoofy attitude prevails; the narratorial voice is handed over to a hoofing, ensemble personification of the moorland, headed by Nandi Bhebhe. I was, by turns valuably and frustratingly, in two minds for much of the show. But in its favour and arguably victorious defence, the production’s confidence and page-turning zest has its own persuasive force.

The frolicsome aspect answers Cathy and Heathcliff’s carefree juvenile phase and, overall, the heady, risk-taking theatricality resembles a surrogate mad passion. As satisfying as the book? No. The best staging ever? Surely not. Yet it’s an invitation to let our imagination roam free together: that feels invaluable right now.

Until Mar 19. Tickets: 020 3989 5455; www.nationaltheatre.org.uk