Wuthering Heights

Martina Badiluzzi

Cime tempestose (Wuthering Heights) is a tribute to the cathartic power of literature and the magic of art and theatre. It is a search for poetry and intensified emotions, for those radical feelings associated with youth and the stage. A family story that is a work of art in itself, unravelling around a house called Wuthering Heights. The moor is equally alive and disturbing, a powerful force of nature marking the frontier between hearth and civilisation.

Catherine and Heathcliff, the protagonists of Emily Brontë's famous novel, are tragic heroes of the modern era. They are the founding myth of our society and tell the tale of the profound misunderstanding between the feminine and the masculine, and between nature and civilisation.
The co-protagonist of this story is the landscape: the moorland from which the protagonists attempt to escape, yet to which they will always return. Nature is the counterbalance to a society that we ultimately reject, yet with which we must come to terms.

"If the magnifying glass is a work like Wuthering Heights, then it is to an art without gender that we tend." It is a literary genre that transcends gender and speaks to the conflicted human being, caught up in the arduous attempt to reconcile male and female nature, the private and the public, the earthly and the otherworldly, birth and death.
Rereading Wuthering Heights as an adult feels like coming home. Emily Brontë subjects us to a rite of passage as readers, sinking into the depths of a painful and violent family history, which is ultimately realised in the comforting image of two fearless lovers: Cathy and Hareton.
Our play begins with these two lovers and a return home. We no longer want Catherine and Heathcliff on stage; adaptations have worn out their names, and critics abuse the terms 'romance' and 'passion' to tell their story. Instead, we make room for Cathy (Arianna Pozzoli) and Hareton (Loris De Luna), the second generation of characters from the novel. Hareton is the 'second' Heathcliff — another unwanted child — and Cathy is an exact replica of her mother.
These two young people have been entrusted with the task of managing their families' legacy — not just the material aspect, but the emotional aspect above all. They must transform the social inequalities, racism and machismo of that small, old-fashioned world.
Can two children who were raised amid narrow-mindedness, toxic family dynamics and violence learn to love each other?
Not everyone remembers that Wuthering Heights is both a place and the name of a house with animated ceilings. In order to move forward and build a future together, Cathy and Hareton must return to the house where they first met and confront their past.
The pivotal scene of Wuthering Heights, with its exchanges between Heathcliff and Catherine, is re-enacted in the dialogue between Hareton and Cathy. It is the house that acts upon them; the house that represents the ghosts of the past. Sometimes, houses have to be destroyed.
Martina Badiluzzi

Cime tempestose is the fourth chapter of a quadrilogy. Together with Cattiva sensibilità, The Making of Anastasia (winner of the Venice Biennale's Call for Directors Under 30 in 2019) and Penelope (co-produced by the Romaeuropa Festival in 2022), it is performed by the same five actresses: Barbara Chichiarelli, Viola Carinci, Federica Carruba Toscano, Arianna Pozzoli and Martina Badiluzzi, who are joined by Loris De Luna. It is a discourse on the female body that crosses the themes of identity, love, and the education of young women.