Award-winning Alberta playwright Vern Thiessen hopes he’s broken “the curse of Emily Brontë” with his new stage version of her sweeping novel, Wuthering Heights — which has its world premiere tonight at the Red Deer College Arts Centre.
While many others have had a go at adapting Brontë’s 1847 tragic love story for stage, film and TV over the years — to Thiessen’s mind, no previous dramatization was satisfactory.
Much of the problem lies with Brontë’s dense, multi-layered story-line about the thwarted lovers Heathcliff and Catherine.
The expansive novel focuses on three generations of characters over half a century. “It’s so huge . . . To properly adapt the book would require a nine-hour version done in three parts, like a big cycle,” said Thiessen, recipient of the Governer General’s Literary Award for Drama, and creator of the plays Blowfish, Vimy and Shakespeare’s Will.
Since this long format is impractical for anything but a TV mini-series, Thiessen opted to focus on only the first half of the novel.
“My play ends when Cathy dies,” he said — thereby avoiding Heathcliff’s continued revenge on the descendants of those he blamed for his heartache — Cathy’s jealous brother Hindley and her wealthy husband, Edgar Linton.
Also, absent from previous Wuthering Heights dramatizations is the extreme violence of Brontë’s world, and its forbidden passions, which were down-played in various versions of the story, including one done by BBC-TV.
“There’s a tendency to romanticize the book, when in fact, it’s an edgy world,” said Thiessen, who tried to insert the novel’s dark spirit into his play, which was developed in association with the RDC Theatre Studies department.
Thiessen doesn’t ignore the emotional and physical violence inflicted by Heathcliff and Hindley, and intends to step it up even more in future rewrites (he said the play will never be finished from tampering).
Although he’s satisfied with the casting of a caucasian student actor as the play’s Byron-esque anti-hero in the RDC production, Thiessen said he will experiment with a non-white actor in future to emphasize Heathcliff’s gypsy origins — which in Brontë’s time, would have made him an unsuitable husband for Catherine.
The 46-year-old playwright’s partnership with the college evolved out his friendship with RDC instructor Lynda Adams.
Winnipeg-born Thiessen, who lived in Edmonton before moving to New York City three years ago, told Adams he was looking for an opportunity to test out a play he’d been working on for a decade. Adams suggested using her students.
Their two-year association was mutually beneficial, said Thiessen, “Educationally, it was great for the kids, and great for me,” he added — since staging such a large play would be prohibitively expensive for a professional theatre group.
Adams said her students learned invaluable lessons about what’s involved in bringing an original play adaptation to the stage.
Staff and students had input on Thiessen’s various script revisions — and the young actors in the cast were being handed new lines to memorize as late as Wednesday morning.
Red Deer College not only provided the needed 22 actors and director (Adams), professional set and lighting designer (Narda McCarroll of Edmonton) was also brought in to imaginatively recreate Brontë’s lonely Northern English moors on the Arts Centre stage. While Thiessen never read Wuthering Heights as a teenager, he said the novel captured his imagination when he picked it up “on a lark” as an adult. “I was very taken with it — surprisingly so,” he said.
While Brontë’s antiquated language and setting seems far removed from our reality, Thiessen said the novel’s nasty, headstrong characters linger in the popular conscience. And all of the themes are universal.
Thiessen chose to focus on the themes of ghosts, unrequited desires and rural remoteness because he believes a Red Deer audience can best relate to these elements.
“We are all haunted by desires we cannot have — and which of us can resist a good ghost story?”
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com