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Nigel Kneale was first tasked with dramatising Emily Brontë's gothic romance
Wuthering Heights for television as a BBC staff writer in 1953. The swiftly
completed adaptation proved a success when staged live by producer Rudolph
Cartier (BBC, tx. 6/12/1953). In 1962 the play was resurrected for a new
production, again by Cartier.
Kneale wrote in 1953 that his task was to "catch and preserve in clear
television terms something of the spirit of that grim, alarming, fascinating and
finally overpowering masterpiece." In doing so, he strips the novel down to the
very basics of its story, focussing on the stormy love between Catherine and
Heathcliff. Kneale telescopes the early events of the novel and cuts the whole
of the second half following Catherine's death, removing entirely the major
characters Hareton Earnshaw, Linton Heathcliffe and Catherine's own daughter
Cathy.
Rudolph Cartier's production moves at a rapid pace, concentrating very much
on the human interaction at the expense of his trademark spectacle. The play is
entirely studio-bound, taking advantage of its limited Wuthering Heights and
Thrushcross Grange settings. On the one occasion that we see the moorland which
so characterises the novel, it is realised as a small studio set. The set alone
does not convince, but in conjunction with sound and wind effects, and the
dialogue's constant Romantic allusions to the uncontrolled physicality of the
landscape ("a real, terrible, physical heaven", Catherine calls it), a wild and
remote location is effectively evoked. Cartier also elicits strong performances
from his leads, with Claire Bloom's Catherine seeming often on the very edge of
sanity and Keith Mitchell's Heathcliff turning convincingly from the slighted
victim of Hindley to the vengeful bully of all those around him.
Dennis Potter, then television critic on the Daily Herald, wrote that the
play "was like a thunderstorm on the flat, dreary plains of the week's
television... The howl of the wind against the windows, the muted pain of Claire
Bloom as the wretched Cathy, and the hunted misery of Keith Mitchell as
Heathcliff, made this a more than adequate offering of a great work."
The liberties Kneale takes in reducing Wuthering Heights for the small screen
mean that it will never please Brontë purists, but it does offer more casual
viewers the effective concentration of its 'spirit' that Kneale intended. While
this production may not be the definitive adaptation of Brontë's novel, it
remains a surprisingly satisfying one.
Oliver Wake
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1. Taking back (1:20)
