Adapting Wuthering Heights
Foreword by television writer Peter Bowker
How do you go about adapting the greatest love story in literature? Well, firstly by acknowledging that it isn't a love story. Or at least, it is many things as well as a love story. It's a story about hate, class, revenge, sibling rivalry, loss, grief, family, violence, land and money...
The multiple themes I have just listed might be part of the reason why this book has proved stubbornly unadaptable. The most successful version remains the Hollywood version starring Laurence Olivier which succeeded because with classic Hollywood ruthlessness they filleted out the Cathy/Heathcliff story and ditched the rest of the plot. It's a great film but it does the novel a disservice.
Three hours of television presents us with the opportunity to open up some of the other themes, not least the story of how damage is passed down through generations, how revenge poisons the innocent and the guilty, how the destructive nature of hate always threatens to overwhelm the redemptive power of love.
Structurally, the novel is notoriously difficult. Ostensibly told through the voice of a visitor called Lockwood, it then becomes a story told by Nelly Dean - the indestructible housekeeper - and sometimes told by letters that Nelly Dean has received which she then reads to Lockwood, who tells us about them. Lockwood arrives at the Heights in 1801, goes away again and comes back in 1802, and we are taken through a series of flashbacks which go from 1770 to 1800.
Faced with this complex and sometimes frustrating structure I realised I needed a subtle and intelligent approach. So I took a Stanley knife to the book, literally. Then I stuck it back together in chronological order and read it again. This exercise in literary vandalism proved a breakthrough moment in pointing to the book's adaptability.
I decided to drop Lockwood altogether and absorb Nelly's reported speech into the main drama. I also decided to begin the story at the moment when Linton is delivered by the dying Edgar to the old Heathcliff at the Heights. Two men hate each other and we don't know why. The Kind Man is giving his ailing nephew to the Monster and we don't know why. Start with a mystery. Start with the Monster. And give the story of the younger generation the room it deserves - foreground the neglected second half of the novel before exploring how they are all victims of the same tragedy that befalls Edgar and Heathcliff.
