There are certain fearful evenings with dance theatre when you know that time has died, that the last darkness has claimed the world. So with the Bern Ballet, which decided last Wednesday to make a UK debut with Cathy Marston’s Wuthering Heights, a show interminable despite its advertised 70-minutes-and-no- interval listing.

It is described by its choreographer as “a personal response” to the narrative: we are told that she has “chosen to reflect only on the first half of the novel and also to reduce the characters to five”, and has “multiplied” Heathcliffe and Catherine to “amplify their inner thoughts and emotions”. Given these brazen get-out clauses, I report that the ensuing gymnastics could as well have been “inspired” by The Critique of Pure Reason or Grace Louise Richmond’s Round the Corner in Gay Street. The stage is occupied by two grey wedge-shapes and a small, off-kilter box, under which dancers seek what should be refuge from their frightful tasks. Above, an assemblage of telegraph wires that descend, as the evening drags its cheerless feet, to no apparent purpose. Lighting is, as we say, “atmospheric”.

The dancers are, for much of the time, dressed for a pyjama party in a reformatory. Beside the stage are a cellist and a conductor involved in an electronic score (by Dave Maric) which might be considered narrative noise. Movement of a clutch-and-
hold-and-twist anxiety ranges between t’ai chi portentousness and touch-me-not aggressions.

The manner seems repetitive, inexpressive. The duplications of characters, the dreary costuming and incidents involving four very basic chairs which feature importantly as the evening progresses (a word I use as one might speak of a recalcitrant glacier) remain for this observer inexplicable. The cast do what they do with all the suavity of undertakers’ mutes. Jenny Tattersall is a much put-upon, bossy Catherine, and the angst is as high as an elephant’s eye. Martha Graham once called the Brontës “doom-eager”. This proves her point. ★☆☆☆☆

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