Australian TV Plays: Wuthering Heights (28 Oct 1959)

The ABC tackles the Brontes. Rather the BBC Nigel Kneale version of the Brontes.

Alan Burke, who directed in Sydney, said this wasn't very good.

Premise

Heathcliff, a gypsy orphan, is adopted by the Earnshaw family at Wuthering Heights on the Yorkshire Moors. He loves Cathy Earnshaw and is hated by her brother Hindley. Cathy rejects Heathcliff, so he leaves, and she maries Edgar Linton.

Heathcliff returns years later, a wealthy man, and takes up residence as master of Wuthering Heights. He marries Edgar's sister Isabella in order to make Cathy jealous.

Cast

Lew Luton as Heathcliffe
Delia Williams as Cathy Earnshaw
Annette Andre as Isabella Linton
David Bluford as Edgar Linton
Richard Davies as Hindley Earnshaw
Geoffrey King as Dr Kenneth
Hugh Stewart as Lockwood
Nancye Stewart as Ellen Dean
Lou Vernon as Joseph

Original novel and adaptation

The original novel is a classic and very well known.

Nigel Kneale's adaptation was filmed by the BBC in 1953 with Richard Todd in the lead. Rudolph Cartier directed.

The BBC filmed it again in 1962 starring Australian expat Keith Michell. Cartier once again directed. This production was highly acclaimed. It has its own BFI Screenonline entry. This says:

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.

From the sounds of things the ABC adaptation did not match it.

Canadian TV did it in 1957 though it wasn't the Kneale version.

Production

The novel was a study text for many Australian high schools.

The production was mostly filmed live, but some segments were pre-recorded around Sydney.

Lew Luton was a DJ and presenter of teen shows at the time including Teen Time. He specialised in moody young men - he played one in an episode of Whiplash. He spent ten years in the UK and returned to Australia in 1972.

Luton said he used Method acting for his performance. He told TV Times he had been studying it for three years.

Brunette Annette Andre, who played Isabella, dyed her hair blonde so as to contrast with dark-haired Delia Williams, who played Cathy.

Annette Andre later recalled in an interview:

I was Isabelle, Lew Luton was Heathcliffe, Delia Williams was Cathy – I liked her and we worked together several times. Lew was strange but we got on well. I remember my hair was very blonde. I’d had to colour it for a TV drama I’d just done in Melbourne.

We rehearsed up in Kings Cross – there were ABC rehearsal rooms up there I believe. Lew and I went off for lunch one day just at the time when the police were looking for a man who was attacking and killing women. Lew looked somewhat like him and also, he apparently had a blonde girlfriend. People would look at us when we were walking together and somehow, we came to the attention of the police, because Lew had to be interviewed. It was rather scary, but it all turned out OK. It did make us a bit nervous though for a while.

I knew Alan Burke very well and liked working with him. I was thrilled to be playing that role, although I would’ve loved to have played Cathy. But Wuthering Heights had been a favourite of mine for years. We worked very hard on it and I enjoyed playing in period costume.

Andre later worked with Alan Burke on Slaughter of St Teresa's Day.

David Twilby later recalled:

Being ‘live’ created a lot of logistical problems. For instance in "Wuthering Heights" the opening scene was in winter and featured snow around the outside of the house. Later in the production they went back to the same exterior and it was summer. During the intervening time we had to remove all the ‘snow’. Not an easy task as the ‘snow’ was actually small pieces of foam and in a studio with ‘live’ microphones we could not use a vacuum cleaner so a dust pan and broom were the order of the day. Despite all our efforts, when the action returned to the outside of the house in the middle of summer I noticed a pile of ‘ snow’ around the window frame that had gone unnoticed.

Alan Burke told Graham Shirley in 2004 it was a large scale production

And unfortunately a little too large for the conditions... It had rain effects and a lot of that sort of thing and they weren’t takes, they were live and the rain machine which was on a loop from .......... (unclear) didn’t work, things went wrong like that. But also I’m not sure the adaptation was terribly good, it was BBC scripts that we got and I liked it simply because it was Wuthering Heights, I thought what fun to do this. So I asked if I could do it...

It was a good cast and nicely designed. A very good interesting set. I think Jack Montgomery was the designer. It had a certain atmosphere but it didn’t work totally, I was not happy with it looking back on it. I can’t think what I would have done differently. Maybe it goes with my misgivings about naturalistic drama. I looked vaguely for symbolism in it and you know, lines like her saying ‘I am Heathcliff’ and I thought you know, rolls of thunder and things and we might get a nice symbolic level of things but it didn’t. I think it really died with its leg in the air sadly. Anyway that’s Wuthering Heights.

Annette Andre told a story in the ABC Radio National documentary Acting on a High Wire about an actor who got stuck during filming. (Listen to it here.) She couldn't remember the production, but Tom Jeffrey said it was Wuthering Heights. Jeffrey wrote to me:

For you info, the story that Annette Andre tells of the actor who couldn’t get out the door occurred on Alan Burke’s production of “Wuthering Heights”. The actor was Dickie Davies, who was playing Hindley. I remember the moment well, as I was the Floor Manager. When Dickie went to open the door, the door wouldn’t open at first, and when he gave it a hard yank, the handle came away in his hand. I don’t remember him climbing out the window, what I do remember is rushing to the outside of the door, giving it hard push and opening it for him. He then walked through. Annette’s telling of the end of the situation is a better one though!

He said this in an NFSA history:

Dickie Davies... had to get out this door and there was a shot of him on one side of the set of him pulling the handle and the next shot was him coming out the door. So what happens [laughs] he goes to open the door and the door handle comes away you know in his hand, he can’t get out the door but the next shot is there so he looks at the door handle and sticks it back in and gives it a turn. Meanwhile I’ve got to the bottom of the door, it was up on a raised like three steps up thing, I gave the door an almighty whack from the other side hoping that it would open and fortunately it did. But Dickie said with a bit of surprise ‘ooh’ and the door opened and he went out.

Reception

Wuthering Heights was one of three plays that Alan Burke directed that year, along with Skin of Our Teeth and Misery Me. He said they all received "tiny ratings" and that Wuthering Heights "was too large for our television conditions, and things went wrong."

Critical reception

The TV critic for The Sydney Morning Herald thought the play was "straightforward enough in its story-telling and sufficiently wide-ranging in its techniques" but "hardly ever caught the necessary brooding Gothic spirit of the time, the place and the situation."

He criticized Lew Luton as being too often "merely surly, when he should have been daemonic, and in general failed to reconcile his desire to work like a twentieth century actor." Other actors were praised, and Alan Burke's direction was called "carefully smooth; but there were moments when the spirit of the production was closer to Stella Gibbons than to Emily Brontë."

The reviewer for the Sydney Sun Herald thought it was "good TV in every respect... cast, acting, camera work and the smooth interpolation of film clips with the actual studio telecast" adding Delia Williams "played the part of the wayward, tempestuous Cathy to perfection" and said Luton was "excellent... although his make up and hairdo was rather unfortunately reminiscent of Marlon Brando's leather-jacketed cyclist in The Wild One." She also thought Richard Davies gave "one of the year's best TV acting jobs."

The reviewer for The Age said the play was disappointing and that "the atmosphere of bleakness and howling winds was not created with realism. Noises off were much too prevalent. The casting was not up to standard. . . . Luton showed a lack of understanding on the part of both actor and producer."

The following week The Age critic, Janus, said he was one of the "unfortunates" who had seen the show.

Neil Hutchison called it "a rather uneven production... there were some good things about it, but Heathcliffe as played by Lou Luton was a very pale reflection of what Miss Bronte intended."

Reception Ratings

The ratings were weirdly high - a 24% share in Sydney. In Melbourne it was 14% which was more normal for an ABC play.