Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has endured for over 175 years. It has inspired filmmakers (1939’s film by William Wyler being, perhaps, the best known), composers (Cliff Richard wrote a musical and Bernard Herrmann wrote an opera) and pop stars (Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights). Another composer who has taken on this dark love story is Ian Ross.
Ross has worked regularly with Emma Rice, the writer/director of Wise Children behind such projects as The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk. Previously she and Ross were both at Kneeheigh Theatre where she adapted and directed The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter and Tristan and Yseult.
Brontë’s book serves as the inspiration for their latest show. Wuthering Heights was scheduled to open at The Wallis in Beverly Hills this week. Unfortunately due to weather-related damages at the theater, the entire run has been cancelled.
Wuthering Heights will next play Chicago Shakespeare Theatre from January 27th – February 19th. The US tour concludes at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ from February 23rd – March 12th.
Music has a pronounced role in this show with characters singing original songs written by Ross; many of them with poetry written by Rice.
Last week I spoke with Ross about his collaborations with Rice, about Wuthering Heights, and the many inspirations he had for the music he wrote. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.
You have a front row seat to seeing how Emma works and you’ve collaborated with her for quite some time. What makes her approach to theater not just something unique for audiences, but something unique for you as a composer?
I’ve been working with Emma for years, previously with the company Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall. I think a lot of our process was sort of formed by that. I haven’t worked much outside of Kneehigh or with Emma to have much of a comparison, but from what I gather from other people’s experiences is that there is a freedom in the room; there’s a generosity. Emma creates a space of anything’s possible where mistakes are welcomed or, in fact, encouraged.
Generosity is at the heart of the whole process. As a creative in that there’s so much space. Sometimes you feel a little overwhelmed with the amount of choices that you can have, but you can find yourself within that space. It’s brilliant. It’s very sort of free. Not to say that it’s undisciplined because it’s quite the opposite. But it certainly allows a lot of space to find your own story within the story.
I was listening to Sound Clash that the two of you recorded and it became very clear in listening to it that there is this generosity of spirit that the two of you share. You seem to have a pretty open collaboration where you can bring whatever you want to the equation and she brings what she wants. Somehow it seems like you two end up on the same page rather effortlessly. Is that an accurate description?
I think so. We do share similar tastes and similar sort of emotional approaches to things. But that’s not to say that we don’t have times where our ideas are clashing, too. That’s partly because she says a bad idea looks after itself. I always think of when they tie off a sheep’s tail. Eventually it just dies and drops off. It’s a bit like that. You have to give space to bad ideas as well in order for them to find their own way. If they’re not right, then the process edits them in the long run, I think.
I haven’t seen every Kneehigh show and every Wise Children show, but I’ve seen a lot of them. This strikes me, sight unseen, as the first to use original songs in a significant way in any of the shows that Emma has done and using them so significantly as part of the narrative. How and why did the two of you feel that this was the show for that approach to be explored?
First of all, the writing that Emma did when she first decided to do Wuthering Heights, she went and stayed up on the moors in Yorkshire in the area where Wuthering Heights was written. She wrote a lot of poetry. She read the book, but she also just wrote lots of of broad poetic ideas for things.
When we first did the research and development they were supposed to just be said. I tried to put everything to music and I’m always trying to turn something into a song just because it’s a joy. It’s the best feeling to have a page of lyrics and and a blank canvas like that.
The poetry for her was relatively new. She was bringing her own writing into things a bit more rather than just adapting things. Becoming more confident as a lyricist, but not quite knowing it. I really pushed for turning some of that poetry into song. That just led to the feeling that maybe our combination as lyricist and composer was a healthy one.
The show runs 2 hours and 50 minutes. The cast album that was released runs 23 minutes. How important was it for the two of you to figure out not just when music can be used, but when you absolutely do not?
Quite important really. But I think also in mine and Emma’s approach there’s never a wrong time for music. There’s never a wrong time for a song, I think, because I feel like it’s such a direct way of telling a story. You can condense, especially with something like Wuthering Heights, which has so much information, quite a lot of narrative through plonking a little song there. I don’t think we really came upon a moment where we thought this was definitely not working. We always just tried and most of the time it felt like it was serving a purpose.
I find it very interesting that that Emma chose to write poetry when Emily Brontë was known for her poetry. It’s a pretty bold move, isn’t it?
Yeah, for sure. We used one of Emily Brontë’s poems and set to music, The Bluebell. [Emma] was keen to get that in there as a nod. I think what was cool about Emma’s approach was she was bringing in this idea of the bigger forces, the godly forces of the moors and of the love affair and of the afterlife. I think it just brought an entirely different flavor. It was sort of incomparable, really, to the work of Emily.
Did Emily Brontë’s novel inspire you on any level, or were you working strictly off of what Emma had decided to do?
I only read it once and parts of it I found hard going. I think some of the language and the dialect stuff is almost impenetrable. But I think what’s really inspiring about it is the setting and the feeling of the moors.
We went and stayed up there for a few days visiting the area where the Brontës were. Understanding more about the history of the area and their family’s connection to it was more inspiring for me than the novel itself.
How do you, as an artist, take the environment in which something is set as inspiration for the work that you do?
Good question. We always start really broadly so there are things connected to the to the story. But what’s really informative for me is is going into that place and feeling the dampness, feeling the weather. The way the clouds can come over very quickly and then pass and everything’s illuminated. Then a storm rolls in and then it’s snowing and it’s so turbulent and so reflective of the relationships in the novel. Immediately I feel that there is an epic-ness in the story, in the setting, which is appealing for the stage. As a composer you can just do big grand sort of gestural work and pick the right moments for it and then just bring it back. So really it was the dynamic of those juxtapositions that are used.
Class differences are an important part of this of this story. Did that influence the way you approached the music?
Definitely. The folk element of the story is constantly at play against the sort of civilized society. I really wanted to feel a sense of the baroque in the music. But also the sensibility of English folk; some really simple sort of plain harmony work. Coincidentally the guy who was living next door to me throughout lockdown is one of Bristol’s well-known folk artists. A guy called Sid Goldsmith. He’s a folk singer and song collector and fantastic concertina player and guitarist. It just felt like it was a really great opportunity to bring that voice into the piece. That true, authentic folk sound, and then try and set it set against the wild, the cosmos and the refined brush cross grange side of it as well.
What’s interesting is you’re talking about baroque and folk music. In listening to Cathy’s Curse, I was imagining Patti Smith singing that song.
Yeah. That’s sort of comes out of nowhere. Hopefully when you get to see the show you’ll see that’s a sort of a peak that takes a while to get there, but it pops out for for good narrative reason, I think.
I don’t know whether Patti Smith was an inspiration, but were other artists? Particularly Kate Bush who famously recorded a song about this story. Beyond the other references you’ve talked about, are there contemporary influences that find their way into what you’ve done for Wuthering Heights?
I’m always influenced by my own sort of mystical journey. Here in Bristol there’s a tradition of bass music, of dub, reggae and trip hop and reggae. I always want to bring a bit of that into it because it’s also a piece of me. But in terms of that tune, really the influence was Lucy McCormick who was playing Cathy when we devised the show. She’s just an outstanding vocalist and performer in her own right.
It wanted to feel like you were in a garage when you were 14 and you had been playing the guitar for a few months and you were just starting to make a noise with your friends. It was that discovery of being able to express a very particular feeling through making a big noise with guitars and drums. So nobody specific in pop music. I’d say Lucy was a big influence.
Why do you think this novel, written so long ago, serves as such catnip for creators to not just turn them into plays, but turn them into musicals or operas, or in this case, a sort of hybrid show?
I don’t know. I guess there’s something enduringly fascinating about the central love story of Cathy and Heathcliff which is really not the largest part of the novel. Really it’s an upsetting love. Although there’s passion, there’s hatred and there’s this fascinating sort of tension between those things where we’re not even sure that we want them to be together at all. But it’s so rich, isn’t it? I think maybe it’s the complexity of their love.
It seems like stories where the couple doesn’t end up together or there is death are the ones that we respond to the most. Why do you think we as as a people so strongly respond to stories where couples don’t end up together?
Gosh, I don’t know. The thing that pops into my mind immediately was the World Cup. It feels a little bit like football. The English fascination with football because we barely ever win these big international things. But it’s that similar feeling of really getting behind something and ultimately ending up in disappointment, but then coming back again and again. Perhaps we get off on it.
Emily Brontë only wrote this one novel. She died a year after it was published and was only 30 years old. If somehow she could flash forward into the future and sit down in the audience and watch this show, what do you think she would have to say about what you and Emma have done with it?
Wow. It’s different, isn’t it? I think she’d think we love it. I think that’s clear. I think we care a lot about it and I think we’ve poured a great deal of ourselves into it, which I think she did, too. The life that she led and the things she endured in order to be able to to be this historic figure, I think we’ve paid tribute to it. I think she’d enjoy it. I think she’d probably be pretty baffled by a bunch of it, too, and maybe a little shocked at some of the language. But I think, overall, she’d give it a thumbs up.
To see the complete conversation with Ian Ross, please go here.
*Due to weather related issues, the entire run of Wuthering Heights has been cancelled.
Main Photo: Sam Archer and Leah Brotherhood in Wuthering Heights (Photo by Kevin Berne/Courtesy Berkeley Repertory Theatre)